Cards Up Your Sleeve

Today I showed the kids how I wanted them to do their note cards. Tonight, they should be able to tell you about this process, the color coding, the one-fact-per-card idea, and then the bibliography. I showed them a paper that I had written years ago, and how I had to do the same thing even when I wrote my paper for college. This is the first real research paper the kids write. I'm not sure how much they will have to do this in middle school, but I know that they will have a solid footing on doing research and presenting what they have found in a written paper. I was speaking with a teacher from Lawrence Central a couple weeks ago, and she said that she has some students who come into her class never having written a paper before, and how she thinks it's a great thing that we do it in fifth grade. Like I tell the kids, we're doing this one deadline at a time. Tomorrow, the kids should either have something printed off and/or have their books, magazines, or other materials with them. We will be doing some note-taking in class, and everyone needs to have materials. If you are low on ink at home and need to e-mail it to me, I can print it off here for them.

The kids should be hard at work on reading their books for their book report projects. Mrs. Appelsies and Mrs. Somers walked around and wrote down the titles of everyone's books today, so we now know what to look for from everyone.

In Math class today, we talked probability. Dice, spinners, and playing cards all came up, as well as the idea of rolling a dice (or "number cube" in case you're against dice and "number cards" if you're against playing cards...you never know) more than once, such as, "What is the probability of rolling a six and then a two?" We covered it all.

Lastly, there is a Caesar's English test on Friday. Lists went home at the end of the day today, but we did not go over them yet. We will do that tomorrow.