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We begin a new week and this one will have our open house event on Tuesday evening. I hope all of you can make it! Math was delayed for about 15 minutes due to the internet being down. We will be getting into the math curriculum this week as up to this point, students were getting exposed to the math mindset, which is more about seeing patterns and problem solving. Patterns will be the theme of math this year since as I had mentioned it before: math is simply the study of, the science of, patterns. As long as students see each new concept as a pattern(s) to figure out, as long as they see everything as having a consistent and reliable set of rules, mastering those concepts will get easier. It also has the potential to make math fun, which is a goal in itself! We began with a simple warm-up activity as the students came in to the classroom. Since students arrive at different times, not everyone will be expected to complete it as it isn't for a grade. It is just something to get them ready for the lesson. Warm-ups will likely be a review of previous material but not always. Sometimes it will be a problem solving activity to introduce a new concept. Since the internet was down, the warm-up was something we did together. I had the students gather to the front and we did this by me choosing some students at random.
Today's math lesson was on ordered pairs and coordinate grids, one of my favorites! I say that a lot but I guess I just like math. Students were given a review mini lesson on ordered pairs. The emphasis is on "ordered" since it goes from left to right. The number on the left is the x-axis (horizontal) while the second number on the right is the y-axis (vertical). One always starts horizontally and then vertically. Or, as the old teaching saying goes, "You need to run before you can jump!" We did a few examples by me randomly rolling two, 20-sided virtual dice. One always represented the x-axis and the other always represented the y-axis. Once that was mastered (easily) we moved on to the independent activities which are on my Math Google Classroom. The directions on one of the activities in which the students had to connect the dots wasn't very clear. What I saw as I made my rounds around the room was students improvising. What I observed was some pretty interesting things. So, this actually worked out quite well. I told them to not stop but to keep going. While we normally do science on Sundays through Tuesdays, this week will be social studies only. The focus was on the UN Sustainability goals and Post Cards for Peace. Literacy involved a mini lesson on Close Reading strategies. While I will cover them more in depth later when it comes to reading comprehension, this was more for independent reading. In this case, it means to closely pay attention to the wording in the text. How is it used? What message is the author trying to convey to the reader? What is the main idea?
Those are subconscious questions that should be going through the reader's mind without even thinking of it. Students were then given time to read independently. The last 30 minutes were for students to work on their fiction stories. I will start meeting and conferencing with them individually once the rough drafts are coming along. Students should be finished with the pre-writing stage at this point.
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