After a rather emotional weekend, I’m a little behind on last week’s review.
Monday
On Monday, my students finished learning about research strategies in the media center. While they worked, I sat in the media center and took time to prepare for our activities for the remainder of the week.
Tuesday
On Tuesday, we went over how we organized our clues about rocks. We then used what we learned from the clues to create a flow chart of notes about rocks. This is one of my favorite ways to do notes. I am basically modeling what students should be doing, and they are helping me fill in the flow chart.
On Tuesday afternoon, we had our first meeting of the Space and Aeronautics Club for this year. It was a fantastic first meeting with lots of new faces and familiar ones. We had 25 join us, and I am really excited to see how many people join in this week!
Wednesday
On Wednesday, we went to the computer lab and started working on a couple of big endeavors. The first was to set up our individual student web portfolio blogs. We use the site Edublogs to set these up. Students also took a learning style quiz and a personality quiz. Use the data from these to help meet the individual needs of my students better. It also helps me to get to know them better.
Thursday
On Thursday, we began using our notes and our clue charts as we looked at our group of rocks in order to determine the types and subtypes of the rocks. This requires the students to do a lot of deep thinking in order to apply the information to the rocks in front of them.
Friday
On Friday we checked our types and subtypes that we determined using our clues. We then used a dichotomous key to begin identifying the names of hte rocks.
It was a great week with lots of learning and problem solving. It’s taking us a bit longer to work through our rocks unit because I want my students to figure things out on their own. I am doing my best to not rush them so that they can get to the conclusions on their own. I think it is worth it to spend a little bit of extra time now in order to develop critical thinking skills that will be well needed in the future.
