Thursday, August 30th, 2018

Day four of the new school year came and went in a pretty decent fashion.  While yesterday morning had a fire drill around 9:30 (required monthly), this morning was uninterrupted.  We began with our morning meeting as I continued our Caring Community curriculum.  The first few days involve going over expectations and procedures so this is nothing new for me.  I will write more as we get more into the heart of it.

Today's reading focus was on some strategies that readers can use to choose books for independent reading.  Since independent reading will be built in to allow students to not only enjoy reading what they like, but to build stamina, today's lesson made sense.  Here are four of the strategies that we went over:

• Look for familiar authors and series
• Use the cover and the blurb on the back
• Use your knowledge of books that you can read easily
• Open the book up and give it a quick try

Very simple!  So, it was not necessary to open their reading notebooks and make an entry page nor update the table of contents.  This was pretty straightforward stuff.

The writing focus was day 2 of getting ideas.  Yesterday's was thinking of an important person, today's was thinking about a meaningful place.  This is also an introduction to writing personal narratives so getting ideas can sometimes be a challenge.  

• Think of a place that matters to you
• List clear, small moments you remember there
• Choose one to sketch
• Write the story

 In science, we did a STEM activity called Saving Fred.  Below is a screen capture of the set-up.  Students worked in teams to come up with a solution.