2015-2016 School year: day 9 REcap

   The first full week of school is officially over, and I am going to celebrate with...a short blog post and good night's sleep. As you can see, my greyhound Garrett has the right idea.
    Honestly, students finished the week on a strong note as we did our first vocabulary word sort activity, started diving into our Social Studies textbook, and learned how to write an introduction for our 9/11 reflection. 
    Here are some cool pictures of the students sorting their weekly reading vocabulary words based on definitions, synonyms and antonyms. Room 308 especially kicked behind when doing this activity, as all groups were ready to rock and roll and sorted the words quickly and efficiently. Of course, I would be remiss not to thank Room 307 for cutting out the strips for all of us at the beginning of the day. 

    See what happened in Social Studies and Writing by continuing after the jump.

    In Social Studies, we finally set up our notebooks and jumped into the textbook, exploring the seven elements of social studies (history, geography, government, economics, science and technology, culture and citizenship) by reading in groups about different places in the world. We will continue this activity Monday in class and then start exploring our own definitions of these terms on Tuesday. Here's a quick picture of the students familiarizing themselves with the textbook, including the history of Beijing, the economic transition from communism to free enterprise in Budapest, and the celebration of Anzac Day in Australia.

    In writing class, I was really proud of the student's attention to detail as we began the second draft of our 9/11 reflections, focusing on how to craft an introduction with a strong topic sentence, four to five sentences that provide a GIST summary of the event, and a concluding sentence that leads into the reasons. Here are the notes that the students took before starting their introductions.

    Last but not least, we celebrated surviving the first full week back by looking at the turtle names as selected by the kids in Room 307. All in all, it was a great day and a fantastic, first full week. Have a great weekend.