I-Search and Gibberish

Well, I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving Break. My Thanksgiving Day went well – all 14 at the table seemed to have a good time – but then I became miserably sick at the weekend. I had hoped to use this time to catch up a bit on grading and then like, but I guess I will have to burn the midnight oil instead. Sigh.

Despite not feeling my best, we had a good day in room 19. We began by journal about our weekend and the experiences we had had. We shared these in pairs and then volunteers shared them with the whole class. Many of the students surprised and pleased me by the vivid details they put into some of their narratives. After that, we went to the library. Monday is not our usual library day, but Mrs. Koneff gave us this time since we will miss next Friday because of set-up for the Book Fair next week.

After library, I discussed the I-Search paper with the class. As I explained to the students, the I-Search paper is a different way of doing research. Instead of having the students pretend to be experts on a particular topic, the I-Search paper asks them to record their exploration to find out more about this topic. I’ll post an example of this later this week. For tomorrow, the students will be completing the first step in this project. They will need to write a paragraph

• indicating a job or profession which they think they might be interested in when they are older;
• why that job or profession interests them;
• what they already know about that particular kind of work; and
• what particular questions they hope to answer about that work as they do their research.

As I said, they have specific directions for this and an example of a reasonable good (but not perfect) paper from last year.

After recess, we read one short (and dull) and one long (but exciting) chapter from Island of the Blue Dolphins.

After lunch, the students had some time to get started on their history homework. We then practiced gibberish, a theater game, to help polish our skills for the play. The students liked this, as you can see below.

We also worked on the songs from Charlie Brown.

We went out PE where the students worked on cooperation, playing a game with Ms. Caruso, endurance, working with Leslie, one of the room 19 parents, and worked on kicking technique with me. I am actually learning stuff about proper PE technique from this EPEC program!

Math is pretty easy tonight. I talked about multiplying by a number in the tens place such as multiplying by 20 or 30 or 90. I pointed out that all they have to do here is to put down a zero and multiply just as they would any other number. BUT, we also took a lot of time to point out WHY they are putting down that zero.

Homework: (1) Do the first paragraph of the I-Search paper as described above. (2) In the History book, do numbers 1-13 on page 136. For numbers 1-6, just write a definition for the word: skip the crossword directions. For numbers 7-13, please copy the question as well as answering it. (3) Do “Multiply by 10,” pages 144-145 in the Envision Math book. (4) Do the Word Knowledge and Vocabulary from Context for the “Food from the ‘Hood” story.