Season of Intensity!

January 7, 2011 | Posted in: Class Updates

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Happy early-release day!  This week marks the start of the season of particularly intense work.  To be clear, I don’t necessarily mean that there is more WORK for the kids to do, rather that our schedule is more packed and that there’s more for me to get through with the kids.  Only part of that can be attributed to preparation for CMTs.  The increased “to-do” list is also the result of more advanced instruction that takes more time, us working on new projects, the required administration of mid-year universal screenings, and so forth.  What this means for the kids is that we’ll have less flexibility in timing, and I will be pushing them that much more to be on-task and focused during lessons and activities.

This was a particularly busy week, but I do want to take a moment to compliment the kids for their fine work yesterday  More on this in a moment.  This week, we focused on three kinds of short-answer responses:

• Journal writing: “Write an entry that could have appeared in (character)’s journal.”
• Comparing and Contrasting: “How are ___ and ___ similar to and different from each other?  Give evidence to support your answer.”
• Humor: “How did the author use humor in this passage?  Explain your answer.”

We started working on journal writing on Tuesday by developing a list of the characteristics of a quality journal entry, as demonstrated by a (content-appropriate) passage from Anne Frank’s diary.  We’ll continue to work on this in the coming week as we develop a journal entry for a character from our recent story about a person’s trip to Vietnam.

Yesterday, the busiest day of the week, we worked on two skills: examining humor and comparing and contrasting.  You should be familiar with our C&C work after looking at last night’s homework assignment.  In our humor lesson, we discussed how authors use humor in ways beyond telling jokes to make the readers laugh.  The kids learned about irony, satire, hyperbole, changes from the norm, and more.  (This gave a foundation of an activity the kids will start in about two minutes. 🙂 )  In both lessons, however, the kids demonstrated a superior amount of attention and focus, and while these lessons took quite a bit longer than I’d planned, it was due to the great discussions we had – a great reason for lessons running past schedule!

So often we talk to kids about problems: “You didn’t get your homework done.” or “Why did you lose recess?” or “How come you did so poorly on your spelling test?”  So please consider taking a moment to compliment your son or daughter for a job well done in school yesterday!

Today, because of early closing, we had to work very hard to complete a few tasks that HAD to be done today.  As a result, the spelling test has been pushed back and will be given next week.

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