We hit the ground running today with another spelling practice list - reading the words aloud, noticing patterns, sorting them and writing them. Then we jumped right into ELA with a short vocab review game (there's an assignment tonight, by the way!), and some more work on characterization. Our big questions today was "What traits make a hero?" - meaning, what traits does an author give their characters that help us see immediately that that certain character is the protagonist. (And maybe more importantly, what traits to WE have that make US the good guy in life??) We read an article where the author shared his idea of what traits make a hero (courage, wisdom, perseverance to name a few....) and we will continue working with this tomorrow as we read an article called "Hurricane Heroes" and do a character study of one of the real-life heroes the article talks about. Today we wrapped up language time by learning a new summary skill and tomorrow we will start one of my favorite "crafty" projects - making super heroes our of ourselves!!
Social Studies managed to stay on track today (which is both good and also sad at the same time!), and we finished talking about the 6 things that every civilization needs to be considered a "civilization" - ask your student about it and see what he/she can tell you!! We even discussed which of the 6 is most important...and discovered that they are all so inter-related that it's really hard to choose! I love those deep-thinking conversations that lead to some impressive realizations. That's what it's all about!
Through it all, our two students from ISU were with us today to observe!
Then, I finished the day by teaching the TEACHERS for a while, which some people will find shocking. Yes, even teachers have to learn more, and today I got to teach MATH which was super fun. I love ELA and Social Studies, but sometimes it's really nice to dabble in the other subjects too, just to keep my skills up! Today I taught a mini-class on Number Talks, which your students are getting within the math classroom on a daily basis. This important math discussion will help your students become better at mental math by honing their number sense skills! It focuses on how we can decompose numbers and rearrange them to make friendlier numbers to manipulate in our heads. For me, this helped solve the mystery of why one of my best friends in high school, Mr. Sean Flood, could always solve those math problems so fast and without paper: his number sense was phenomenal while mine was mediocre at best! Working with numbers in our heads is the best way to improve our math competency!
Now can you see why I'm all teached out today? Teaching kids! Teaching pre-service teachers! Teaching current teachers! It's time to relax!!!