Golden Ratios and Silver Linings

I've been really happy with how the kids have treated our reminder lessons on Daily 5 this week. Daily 5 is a program which utilizes five essential reading and writing habits independently. By the time the students reach fifth grade, though, it pretty much boils down to "Daily 3". These three are reading to yourself, reading to someone, and writing. The other two would be word work and listen to reading. Some of the kids will be doing the latter, and I think we will all be doing at least a smattering of the former in class. But this week we have practiced the other three, we will review them tomorrow, and then next week we will re-launch into guided reading. I've really enjoyed my opportunities to meet with the kids one-on-one to conference with them on their reading. Thank you to Mrs. Raasch, who took the broken pieces of my attempts to do this and cleaned it up, gave me a better format for generating these meetings, and made all "right". I'm pretty darn grateful that we live in a community where we have those kinds of resources on our staff.

I shared with the kids today my appreciation for graphic novels, comic books, or other books where strong visuals are very much a part of the storytelling. I told them that when you have words with pictures--as long as the pictures are a strong part of the story--it forces the right and left sides of your brain to work together. It doesn't necessarily make you smarter, but it definitely makes your brain stronger. I shared with them everything from an X-Men comic to more heady material, namely 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago. This having been said, though, I told them that when it's time for silent reading, I want them to read actual chapter books that are made up of words and sentences. There is a time and place for all kinds of storytelling, but most of the time for Daily 5, I want them to be reading novel-novels.

I told them about the happenstance connection I have with Roberto Clemente, the work I would like to continue one day for a museum dedicated to Clemente in Pittsburgh, and I now realize that I totally forgot to tell them about the fact that I first read about him in second grade in my reading book.

Math folks: During Math today, we learned about a couple of things: The Golden Ratio and n-to-1 ratios. I had them take notes in their Mathcabulary Notebooks today. I told them that on next week's test, they will be allowed to use their Mathcabulary Notebooks. I will help them load some example problems like will be on the test into those notebooks, so that they will be ready for the test. During the test, they won't be allowed to ask questions, but they will be allowed to have those notebooks out, just to help them through it. There are a lot of confusing differences between things like rates and ratios, percentages and parts of wholes, etc. I want them to be as primed as possible before next Thursday.

Great week so far. Hope the same goes for all of you.