No Monday Moaning Here

Well, another fine day in room 19. We did a lot of focused work today in a variety of areas. We worked on two final drafts of our Thinking Maps compositions. We have only one more map to do -- the Bridge Map -- and then we will be culminating our project by making our books and probably taking a quiz on the eight maps. In Open Court we did practiced our predicting and making connections strategy using the post-it notes. Our story this week is an excerpt from the book Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia McLaughlin. This is quite an affecting story of a young woman from Maine who marries a widower with two children living somewhere on the Great Plains during the late 19th century. The students were particularly moved when they learned that the mother had died in childbirth.

We changed seats today just before going to recess. It takes me a couple of weeks to get a good feeling for each child's personality and to know what seat would provide the best opportunity for focus and constructive collaboration. After recess I gave students an opportunity to work on the latest History packet pages. All of them will be doing some -- or a lot -- of work tonight to finish these, but I wanted them to understand what I am looking for in these study guide assignments and how they will be helpful to them on the test. (Of course, the most basic reason for creating the assignments is to sharpen reading and thinking skills, but talking about that is not motivating for the fourth grade mind!)

After lunch we continued work on our Writer's Workshop compositions. A number of these are quite creative, and I look forward to publishing some of them shortly. We had PE where we continued our kickball tournament as well as working on cardiovascular fitness. We concluded with some Math workshop time, and I gave a mini-lesson on rounding with them.

Home Studies: (1) Independent reading and writing summaries in log. (2) Conclude work on the History packets pages for lessons 3 and 4 of chapter 1. (3) Continue work on math pages. These should be finished by Thursday at the latest, but earlier is even better.