Sixth Grade tackled many new things this week. We kicked off our week using our Chromebooks to read about current events. We also began our first novel study, Hatchet. While students read with me in small groups, (in order to provide more individualized instruction) other students had their choice of several literacy stations to complete. These stations are designed to offer the children choice over their work (which helps boost engagement in learning) and experiences in authentic literacy tasks. What is an authentic literacy task? It is something that requires the learner to use their reading and writing skills in a meaningful way. Independent reading is an authentic literacy task- students are reading for a real reason- they chose the book! Word work that allows the children to represent word meanings in multiple ways builds vocabulary and word recognition. Stations aren't something that we will do every week, but students definitely worked responsibly and enjoyed what they were doing! Students also peer reviewed their memoirs and provided feedback to encourage and help their classmates grow! Finally, we kicked off our math unit in decimals with a game- students race to read and write decimal numbers the fastest. Students really seemed to love this one!
0 Comments
While it was only a four day week, it was super busy here at WCRS! We've been working on reviewing "Hard and Fast Rules" in grammar- the skills we need to be fluent writers. We also have been reviewing place value concepts in Math. This solid foundation we are reviewing will come in handy when we start our decimal unit. We broke out the whiteboard to change up our classwork on this day: Fri-yay, I mean Friday was probably my favorite day! We started off talking about what we were excited about- But then, we pulled out... the Chromebooks! Our school has purchased a set of 30 Chrimebooks that will help expand out students horizons and the work that they produce. Today we focused on learning how to handle them and use their different functions. We participated in a prediction activity about our upcoming novel study. The day wrapped up with science stations that had students working with fm the different science tools we will use throughout the year.
Our class has been hard at work reviewing key skills needed to be successful this year. Our classmates took turns helping us go over the four basic math operations and came up with questions for us to practice. We also worked at different stations geared toward learning about some of the events on September 11. Students had the opportunity to choose the order in which they completed the stations. Finally, Friday afternoon science involved parter reading about working dogs at airports. Ask your student what they learned!
Friday=fantastic! We spent time today reflecting on our first week. The general consensus? We feel great about our first week and it was an amazing week. We started our Memoir writing unit by writing Six Word Memoirs about our first week of school. Click here for the link to the padlet where we are collecting our memoirs. These were written in groups this morning. Check them out! We wrapped up our day by launching our first unit in science. We'll be studying the ways scientists work and the tools they use to do their jobs. We will start by studying the scientific method. Our dissolving Skittle experiment today will be the basis of our learning. I can't wait to keep going on Tuesday! One of the things that we focused on today was kindness. We talk during a couple of different points of the day about how kindness can make the world a better place for others and for ourselves. First, we took a look at how kind gestures make us feel. Take a look at some of our responses below. We also read the book Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson. There is one strong message in this story, and this class gets it! We also launched this years Kindness Challenge. Each week, we will be challenged to show our kindness in a special way to those around us. We were also challenged to be on the look out to see if anyone in the class is engaging in kind acts and to recognize them for it. More on that later!
|