All Things Being Equal

Gosh, what a pleasant day. Everything went so smoothly. We began with our Sustained Silent Reading time. The journals this week are 1000 times better than they were the first week; the students are really getting the idea of both logging their daily reading and summarizing as they go. We'll start pressing soon to add a few other strategies like "Making Connections" and "Predicting", but for now it couldn't be better.

We continued our work on the "Asking Questions" strategy, this time using the OCR text. The students read the story "Mae Jemison: Space Scientist" aloud, and as we were reading the used post-it notes to annotate the text with their questions. We shared some of these as we went along, and then when we were towards the end of our Open Court time, the students took the post-it notes out of their books and put them on a piece of paper together with the quoted section from the text which had provoked the question. For example, on page 80 of the text, Mae just goes to medical school. The author provided no background for this decision and one student wrote, "Just why does she want to go to Medical School?" What a great example of "Questioning the Author"!

We took our Science test after lunch. It may take a few days to get these graded and posted on the website, but we will let you know how they did. Incidentally, if you did not have a chance to read Sandy Bank's column in today Los Angeles Times about receiving email notifications of grades, do read it. I think it's both amusing and relevant.

The last 45 minutes was a little noisy, but it was good noise. We introduced the concept of equivalent fractions today and used fraction bars for the first time. You can see these in the pictures above. New math manipulatives always put children in a more playful than studious mood, but they quickly and quite visually grasped the idea that certain fractions like 6/12, even though they appear large, are really the same as a smaller-looking fraction like 1/2.

Home Studies: (1) Open Court packet -- this should be a fairly fast one. (2) Begin work on Math packet. This will be due no later than October 15, but it would be great if it were finished and corrected well before then.

Since students did reading in the morning, no reading is required as part of the homework.