Week 11: Tenth Day in the Classroom

Week 11: Tenth Day in the Classroom

Date: Thursday, November 11^th, 2021

By: Monica Schrank  

This week was fun day in the classroom. During math, the students were learning how to subtract with re-grouping using a number line. The students first reviewed subtracting using a hundreds chart which made it easier for them to visually understand how to subtract by tens and ones. Some of the students were adding instead of subtracting, so I worked individually with a group of students focusing on the concept of going up on the hundreds chart because you are subtracting and the number is getting smaller (as opposed to going down where the number is getting bigger). This concept can be difficult for students to understand which is why it is important to use visual representations (a hundreds chart) and to review constantly with them because this is new for them. The more practice we give students on learning new skills, the easier it will be for them to understand and master the skills

Since I taught the students about the ocean habitat last week, my MT asked if I wanted to teach them about the arctic habitat. I put together some information on a PowerPoint about the temperature, plants, animals, and how the arctic is changing due to the warming of the climate. The students were so engaged and loved using their science notebook to write down the information that they heard about plants and animals in the arctic. When I talked about an animal that lives in the arctic, they shouted the name of the animal and wrote it in their science notebook. You could tell it was fun for them because it helped them to be more engaged and focused during the lesson to keep an eye or ear out for the different animals or plants that live in the arctic.

For Daily 5 this week I got to meet individually again with three groups of students. The students were practicing their nonsense words. The first group of students I met with had more difficult nonsense words because they are the more higher-level students academically. The lowest group academically had nonsense words plus real words that had the same vowel sound being pronounced in the nonsense words to better understand and pronounce the words. For each group, we highlighted the vowel sound which was a short or long ‘a’ (depending on the group) to make it easier for the students to pronounce the nonsense words.  

            The students were practicing their writing skills today by re-writing their stories about fall. The students were only rewriting the first part of the paper such as the attention getter(s) and topic sentence. One of the things I thought was a really fun idea was that my MT had the students put on plastic glasses (without lenses) which were called their "Zoom Zone" glasses to ‘zoom in closer to their writing’ while they used their writing buddies which was ring that they wore that had eyeballs on it to help them to track their writing and use special handwriting pencils. The little writing buddies helped the students to see what they were writing and helped them to catch any spelling or grammatical errors while writing. The students were so excited to use these materials as they wrote to help them to be more focused an engaged, and I could tell it did help the students a lot. The littlest of things that teachers can do in the classroom to help the students to enjoy an activity is very important to help them to want to do the activity more and make it more fun for them.