Most splendid

Today was a typically normal, splendid day. The children were pleasant and we were on task and doing great things. We are working with more challenging numbers of the week for morning work and for Word Study, we took a pre-test to spell and identify generalizations from the previous weeks. Students have chosen generalizations that they feel they still need to work on and those patterns will be where they will work this week. In Writer's Workshop, we created with LEGO's! We talked about details in our writing and so we just used LEGO's to create and model/simulate how we can visualize our story. Unfortunately, we don't have all the accessories and characters that I'd like but we were able to make it work with what we have. In Music, they worked on the value of notes and they made comments relating this to math~kudos for recognizing math in the real world! Afterward, we read more from Number the Stars and got a reality check when the Nazi soldiers came to the Johansen home in the middle of the night looking for the Rosens... In Reader's Workshop, we focused on comprehension with a dice game and read independently and blogged or visited the library. After what turned out to be a nice-not too chilly-recess, we completed a number talk where students solved challenging multiplication problems with ease and mentally! 4,110 x 6 ! This gave them the confidence to accept that they DO know what they are doing and made Math go smoothly. We learned a few strategies for multi-digit multiplication to help make our problem-solving more efficient. With larger numbers, repeated addition isn't that great. Finally, we spent the last part of the day discussing our rights and responsibilities as citizens of the school as well as the rights and responsibilities we have as adults. This brought our discussion to the election tomorrow and we even held a mock election in the class--Which milk do you prefer? White or Chocolate? Chocolate won with 69% of the votes! They got stickers too to show their civic pride. Some students even voted for the Buckeye Children's Book Award and I read Duck for President to them while we waited.