Constitution Day

Happy Constitution Day! 226 years ago, our Founding Fathers signed our U.S. Constitution so we did many things to learn about and understand this document. In Reader's Workshop, I met with a good chunk of students to talk about primary sources, why some words within the Constitution (Posterity, Tranquility, Blessing, etc.) are capitalized as well as why the amendments are important and what our life would be like without these changes. We participated in a webcast LIVE from the National Archives in Washington D.C. (hopefully you saw our tweets and that @DiscoveryEd retweeted our tweets!) where we saw the actual Constitution and other primary sources. This was very cool-especially to those of us that have seen the National Treasure movies. I read, We, the Kids by author and political cartoonist David Catrow and (my favorite) watched the School House Rocks video of The Preamble! I think students have a better idea of our rights how important our Founding Fathers were to our country.
In Writer's Workshop, we did a shared writing based off of how R.J. Palacio began Wonder. We took a small moment from class last week where Sheldon (one of the hermit crabs) clamped on to Levi's finger and used that to springboard a story from the perspective of Sheldon. Each kiddo can go on and now add to our story using Google Apps. We also read independently and continued our work with rounding in the real world for Math.