Lesson Plans
11/10/2017
Students spent time this week making lesson plans to teach our 2nd grade class. Students are in groups to plan their direct teach, activity, and assessment for their topic. Each group has the topic that they liked and they have worked really hard sifting through material to teach. On Thursday, we took time for them to share their current progress and to ensure everyone is getting all of the required content. They made a task management chart so they can track their own progress and ensure that every one is contributing to the overall success. Novels from 5th GradeStudents were thrilled to do Morning Meeting in Mr. Johnson's room on Wednesday. To help the current 5th graders get started with their novels, his past students answered questions and gave advice to the current authors.
Sixth grade loved helping and really gave some excellent advice. They also really loved getting the money from their book sales which was distributed at the same time. Spooky Stories
11/3/2017
We spent a lot of time this week working on writing. We started by writing Halloween stories that needed to include all of the elements of fiction. Students were given a plot map that labeled all of their prewriting activities to be done before they began their initial draft. We discussed the requirements of each of the specific items and that we needed to work on transitions and details overall. Since it was Halloween, we read our stories around a projected cozy fire and talked about some of their details. As students were reading them, they were catching a lot of their own errors and clarifying details to the audience that they could tell were unclear. So Wednesday, we started working on peer editing and actual lessons on what editing a paper should look like. We looked at lots of writings to see changes in word choice, different sentence structures, and how to elaborate and/or cut out extra information. When they finally got with their partners to peer edit each others' papers, they were required to ensure all of the elements of fiction were present and clear in both papers, that the paragraphs contained topic sentences and clear details, that sentences were worded in the best way possible, and that they stories contained good transitions. Overall, the stories improved drastically throughout the week and were a lot of fun to read. Invasive SpeciesThis week students also worked on a project about an invasive species of their choice. They looked at how their example was moved to the new location and how it affected the new ecosystem. Then they made a plan to solve the problem. They ran into a lot of challenges because their plan needed to be feasible and specific. Working together, they created WANTED posters as their final product and told the class how the community needed to respond to these threats. Postcard UpdateWe have received a lot of postcards and are still working to display them all! This week we also received a gift from Texas. The book sent to us has two pages for each state. Each state is explained with the capitol, state song, state bird, and the date that it entered the union. This thoughtful gift makes an excellent resource for our room.
|
AuthorCharlotte Woodside recently moved to Alaska from Central Texas. This is her 8th year teaching middle school. Archives
April 2018
Categories |