BLM Day 13

Ms. Leom was HAPPY to return to class today!! There are some days that Elementary Room 113 is one of the only places where everything makes sense - pretty crazy to think about with 27 students who bring their own gifts and baggage to school depending on the minute!

We've been working Main Ideas and Supporting Details, Asking Questions, Biographies, Word Works in the areas of hyphenated compounds, comparison suffixes -er and -est, challenging plurals, and this week we added fluency. It was a lot to organize and review at the start of our day today! We also decided we needed to develop Author's Purpose, when our memories appeared foggy.

We started with our Word Work: Challenging Plurals. We sat on the floor, and Ms. Leom modeled our sorting activity for today. Sorting words by physically moving them helps students think about words, their patterns, and students have to determine how to sort the word and explain it. 

Mr. Greninger's students

students work in groups of 2 or 3

We had to develop a checklist to make sure we met all of our learning goals for the morning. We also took some notes to review. 

 It was eXcItInG to return to class and observe ALL students had learned about fluency in the previous two days. Students also read to me, and I could HEAR the improvement in their use of expression and fluency from last week. It was also a thrill for them to appreciate their progress!

We started talking about Author's Purpose, and it soon became apparent, that we needed to develop this strategy. Our students had some background, but some needed a review, some students needed a full instruction, and other students needed to warm up.

Ms. Leom's class notes

Mr. Greninger's class notes

 Next, we took our discussion about fluency, dialogue, and author's purpose to read a Readers' Theater about Marian Anderon and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ms. Leom's students

We took some notes about the characters.

Mr. Greninger's Class Notes

Ms. Leom's class notes

We are developing vocabulary as we read. We made a list of possible words, and students volunteered, sharing what they thought they knew about each word. Ms. Leom even recorded the students' ideas that were incorrect. As students read, they will jot down information, and we will clarify the definitions. Students develop vocabulary using context clues (information from the text).

Our learning goals as we read were:

It was exciting to see students engaged and driving our classroom learning. It is interesting to see how two classes can vary in their learning based on the input shared in class.