2015-2016 school year: Day 8 Recap

I was feeling tired like my nephew Sean on Thursday, but it was still a good day in the classroom.

    What did I say Wednesday about having that second wind?
    It certainly did not feel that way when waking up Thursday (it might have something to do with running around Midway Airport on Wednesday night for the first time in two weeks).
    While the first full week felt a bit draining on Thursday, both personally and for the students (who were certainly showing signs of eagerness for the much-deserved weekend), overall it was a good day.
    Here's what happened in reading, social studies and writing.

    In preparation of beginning our first novel, Paul Fleischman's Seedfolks, next week, students did a first close read of a cool NEWSELA article about a community garden that was started in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood for refugees from the Congo and the Asian nations Myanmar and Bhutan. After reading independently, annotating the text, and summarizing the different sections of the article, students listened as we moved into the second stage of the close read, the teacher read aloud. As a class, we broke down the meaning of words like heartland, proceeds, plots, tended, daikon and agricultural (just to list a few) and started exploring the different text structures (descriptive and comparison and contrast) of the article. Here are some pictures.

    Sensing the need for movement, I had students in social studies form definitions of the seven elements of social studies: 1) History 2) Economics 3) Science and Technology 4) Geography 5) Citizenship 6) Government and 7) Culture (not Cutler, yet another bad joke).
    Posted around the classroom were giant white strips of each word. In groups of four or five, students spent about four minutes at each word, forming group definitions of the concept based on their associations with the word. Students had some very interesting word associations, which we will look at tomorrow and I will share in the diary sometime this weekend. Here are some pictures of the concepts and the students in action.

    In writing class, we finally got the opportunity to pick our classroom jobs, including the always popular "Turtle Feeder." After selecting our jobs, we continued with our punctuation packet, exploring how to use quotation marks with direct quotations. To cap the end of class, each of the nine tables in my classroom had the opportunity to observe and name one of the nine turtles in my four tanks. I will release these pictures and the much-anticipated names of the turtles this weekend on the diary. Until then...have a good night.