Getting the Wheels Turning

I've loaded the kids up with ideas and paved the path for them to come up with ideas of their own for the research projects. Between that, the Spelling Test, and the Caesar's English test, that was just about all we got done today! I'm sure the lack of two hours this morning had something to do with that also. I'm a failure this week because we only ended up having one day of reading groups, but we did get a lot more done than we would have before. I have grandiose expectations for next week. We didn't even get our DOLs graded today!

Something That Changed the World is the idea behind their research project. They're going to be reading and writing about this subject for more than two months, which means we're going to want some guidance from home as well as my own input into whatever choice they make. I told them it's way too easy to make it too broad (World War II) , too narrow (what Barack Obama ate for breakfast last Tuesday), too recent (anything after 9-11), or so old we know nothing about it (invention of the wheel).

They also received their report cards today and so they should be ready to tackle this next six weeks head-on. It's going to be fairly different from the previous semester--reading groups, the gigantic project, and this week we also started some work in levers, pulleys, and other simple machines. We'll continue that next week (according to plan, at least) along with learning about loads, energy, and effort. We've got some exciting writing exercises coming up (although the kids might call that an oxymoron, it's exciting for me) to help with the research project and our Social Studies gets more and more interesting as we go.

Before long, we'll be getting into the Rube Goldberg projects--maybe by the end of next week, at least. Here is a great example of what I'm going to be looking for out of these groups.I will be putting the kids into groups, they'll have to bring in toys and other useful tools from home to make their project as cool and unique as possible. I'm looking greatly forward to it! I do this every year, and it's one of the highlights for me and the class. I have high school students telling me that what they remember from my class to this day is the Rube Goldberg machine, so you can bet this will be a good thing.

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you on Monday.