A great day, even though the teacher felt seriously sleep-deprived. What a joy to have such intelligent and cooperative children this year!
A couple highlights of the day. First, in Open Court Reading, we focused today on visualizing as a strategy. Like predicting, this is a skill that good readers unconsciously use. Good readers constantly make movies of the words they read. Poor readers just focus word-by-word on what they are reading. But visualizing is a skill which can be taught and practiced, and that is exactly what we did today. We read "Toto," the story of a timid young boy and a foolish young elephant. This is probably the best-written story in the entire anthology. It has a lot of wonderfully descriptive language. Students wrote down words and phrases that seemed to paint pictures in their heads for them. They did this on post-it notes. Tomorrow they will use those notes to actually draw and color a picture of the story.
We also learned about body percussion today. This is a way to use the body as a percussion instrument. The basic moves are "clap," "snap," "pat," and "stomp." We reviewed the Marco Polo chant and added body percussion moves to it. We practiced it a couple times. The students then broke into groups to practice with their own rhymes or chants. We will spend a couple more days practicing these, and then we will film them and post these performances to the blog.
Homework: They had a good bit of time to get started, so this should not take that long. (1) Do the spelling jumble. (2) Do the OCR packet pages for the first part of the "Toto" story. These are "Word Knowledge," "Search and Circle," and "Vocabulary from Context." (3) Do "Estimate," Math, page 35, #2-21. (4) Do "Strategies," Math, page 38, #3-39. Find exact answers here, but do it mentally.
3 comments:
I suppose we will never know why you were sleep-deprived. This is a good way to illustrate your lesson in visualizing.
I wish my sleep deprivation had something to do with a wicked secret life. It has more to do with embarking on a house renovation project right at the time it looks like we may be starting the Great Depression II (and this time the voters reelect Hoover). Sigh.
As Albert Einstein said, "I never think of the future - it comes soon enough." Our escrow closed on a big blue house days before 9/11 when Stewart turned the delightful age of 3. As planned, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a major house renovation project. From the perspective of now having it all done, I must say that it's all worth it. The sleepless nights are par for the course. Don't worry. Everything is going to be OK.
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