    | It's been way too long since my last post, but school has been extremely busy the past two weeks. Additionally, today was a really rough day, not for the students, but for me personally as I felt a bit overwhelmed and frustrated putting out some needless fires. The key is to make sure that days like today are the exception rather than the norm. As is always the case, I love to teach and appreciate the wonderful opportunity to work with great kids everyday, even if the occasional stresses of the job do not always allow me to show that. Of course, this job is not a sprint but a marathon with highs and lows along the way. It's only human nature to have a couple of bad days interspersed with the many good days, though it is not always easy to see this big picture when in the midst of the daily grind. Unfortunately, today was one of those days during which I struggled mightily to keep this perspective in mind. With all that said, I will eventually catch up on what has been happening within my classroom the past two weeks as I am committed to this diary, and first and foremost, my students. As for today, here is what happened. In reading class, we reviewed last week's vocabulary quizzes, especially the need to show the meaning of vocabulary words when writing paragraphs. In other words, students should assume that I do not know what the word means, go beyond just using the word correctly, and then show meaning via some context clues. From here, students did a quick read of the brief outline of the Great Chicago Fire called The Chicago Fire. They will do a GIST summary of the short book (only 16 pages) tonight and then use this |
background as a point of comparison when diving into our next reading selection, Jim Murphy's awesome The Great Fire.
In Social Studies, students took the second part of their Chapter 1 exam, focusing on content from the study guide, after we reviewed the first part of the exam, the vocabulary and places. Overall, students did great on the first part of the exam. Today's exam was much more challenging. For Wednesday, students will finish their "Write about History." We will begin Chapter 2 of the textbook on Wednesday as well. We also returned to CNN Student News today after a week off.
In Writing, students took a D.O.L. quiz. They then received the graded version of their 9/11 reflections. I was very happy with the overall effort by my class. We then changed jobs for the week and called it a day.
Here's to a better day tomorrow! I am excited as fifth and sixth grade are officially having our first Battle of the Books meeting, and I have a lot of books en route to my home to share with them! :-)
In Social Studies, students took the second part of their Chapter 1 exam, focusing on content from the study guide, after we reviewed the first part of the exam, the vocabulary and places. Overall, students did great on the first part of the exam. Today's exam was much more challenging. For Wednesday, students will finish their "Write about History." We will begin Chapter 2 of the textbook on Wednesday as well. We also returned to CNN Student News today after a week off.
In Writing, students took a D.O.L. quiz. They then received the graded version of their 9/11 reflections. I was very happy with the overall effort by my class. We then changed jobs for the week and called it a day.
Here's to a better day tomorrow! I am excited as fifth and sixth grade are officially having our first Battle of the Books meeting, and I have a lot of books en route to my home to share with them! :-)
RSS Feed
