This week has been the wrap up of our wellness unit. Students completed their meal plans and their wellness journals. We also had our Human Growth and Development week and I was pleased with the candidness of the students and their willingness to learn. We had a set of expectations for this and the class was quite good at maintaining them. I do hope they got the information that will help them as they move from childhood to adolescence.
Our math unit is moving a long quite nicely. We spent the week looking at conversion of fractions to decimals and also at writing and comparing equations. The latter of these two can be tricky when you see that there are more than one way to write the same number sentence when it comes to fractions and mathematical practices. We will continue with this for several more weeks as students get familiar with nomenclature and expressions. Next week we look at the division of whole numbers by fraction parts and move to fractions divided into fractional parts.
Our writing of the fantasy story is moving along very well. All students are finished their first drafts, have read them into the computer, completed the 8 sketches of their story and some have even started the revisions by listening to two classmates stories and making comments to improve them. Once this is completed the last task is to complete the final draft and this should be completed by next Friday. It is the last of the fiction writing for this year. Next unit is on literary essays.
We had a talk in class this week about proper reading. What I mean with this is that students should be reading so that they are learning about reading. We have covered, theme, inference, evaluation, character analysis, plot, and setting so far and I am expecting students to use these learnings when they write about the reading they are doing. In their last journal blogs, I did not get the sense that some of this is happening which means that either the books they are reading are too hard for them or that they are not thinking while they are reading. It is important to enjoy reading but also to be thinking about your reading as you do it. This is what all good readers do and students can learn a lot about subject matter, concepts, ideas and writing by doing this. It is an important part of education such that it will become a big part of their schooling in the coming middle and high school years. I will continue to review this with the students and show them examples of what I mean.
That is all for this week. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me and I will set up a time to meet with you.
