Writing

Our day began as all others do... M4T and Ohio Dailies for morning work, followed by our morning question and i-time. In our morning meeting, we shared a characteristic about ourselves that make us weird and then played category challenge-professional athletes. We said the pledge and wrote our SMART goal and then in Math Workshop, we finished our math assessments (so far, a TON of perfects and near perfects!), worked on extension activities and had some free math. *I will not confirm nor deny that there was poker/blackjack happening...but they were adding and comparing numbers! We had Music, lunch and outdoor recess. In A Night Divided, Gerta decided that because she couldn't stop thinking about her dad and that building, she went back. This time, she took a flashlight and went down into the air raid shelter. Instead of it being a solid metal box, the walls were dirt...her dad wants her to make a tunnel to the west side! We read independently, visited the library and conferenced with me. In Reader's Workshop, we read the poem, "What is Science?" in StoryWorks and completed a comprehension worksheet about the Sciences. We learned a lot of -ologies! I tricked them into writing today for Writer's Workshop by asking them to come to the meeting area with their Writer's Notebooks and a pencil. Once some of them were there, I began writing to them that today, we were only going to write to each other and not speak. The message began to spread through the class and we started having conversation only on paper. A lot of them asked, "Why are we doing this?" Well, their sentence didn't have capitals and punctuation but still asked the question. My response was, "We need to practice writing so that we can become better writers." By the end of Writer's Workshop, they were writing more and using better conventions-capitals and punctuation. They even asked to do it again! We ended our day with the Ohio Energy Project and discussing renewable and nonrenewable resources.