As I reflect on today I have one thought in my mind, "My brain hurts." We did a lot of analyzing and critical thinking today that lead to some deep and rich conversations! Unfortunately, we were not able to get to the Word of the Day; however, when we begin following our regular schedule, we will have a WOD every day.
The first hight light of the day came this morning during our read aloud Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. As I told the students, Patricia Polacco is my favorite author because of the overlying theme to all of her books about making yourself a better person. The book Thank You, Mr. Falker is an autobiographical story about how Patricia was able to over come her learning struggle with dyslexia because of the help of her fifth grade teacher. Our rich conversation we had about Patricia's struggle and how her classmates negatively responded to her learning disability allowed all of us to identify with Patricia and know that we will support each other as a class.
Our afternoon was filled with diving deeper into using coordinates to help us create a visual representation of time and distance. The students performed an experiment and collected data for looking at the relationship between time and distance. We then used a graph to create a visual representation of our data and analyzed the different parts of the graph. I am very impressed with the conversations that the entire class had and the understandings that came out of the conversation. We will be continue using this skill throughout the entire year.
Finally, we ended the day with an challenge to move a ping-pong ball from one cup to another. The assignment notebook code for today will be a three to four word phrase your student uses to describe how their group attached the string to the cup in order to get the ping-pong ball from one cup to another. Please also ask your student to elaborate on the challenge. You are not required to write your child's elaboration in the assignment notebook, I do not want you writing a short story as the start of your weekend begins.
I hope you all have a great 3 day weekend and I will see you all ready to learn on Tuesday! Please check the Photo Page at the end of the weekend as am going to try to get the pictures from this week up to view on the page.