Two weeks of quality writing...

We are all sensing the vibrations coming off of each other in room 239. It seems as if winter break can't get here fast enough, but we really need to hold on! We have finished reading Out of the Dust, and we have begun the process of writing our final polished piece for response to fiction. We will be using all of our resources to get through - the marble behavior plan, examples of student writing, quotes from the book, the timeline of events from the novel on two walls, and our patience.

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This week: All week - Grammar and root word warm-up exercises
                  Monday - Genius Hour (many new ideas brewing!)
                  Tues-Fri we'll be writing different parts of our polished piece!!
Next week: All week - Grammar and root word warm-up exercises
                  Monday - Genius Hour (Have you asked your child what he/she is learning?)
                  Tuesday & Wednesday - type and edit our polished piece
                  Thursday & Friday - watch the PBS special about the dust bowl
                  Saturday - time for family... Enjoy!

Classroom Conversations

We ended the week by having a classroom discussion - about whatever each class decided was important. Many topics were raised, and we started to come up with solutions - to behavior issues (talking over each other, following directions) and use of "special" chairs (such as yoga balls). We talked about some of it aloud, and we wrote some of our thoughts in blurbs on Today's Meet.

We will be addressing these issues more this coming week, while we realize that we still have many choices in this class. This class is run much like a democracy - where students have choice. When asked what choices do we have in this class, one student said the following:

I hope this transcends to Genius Hour on Monday. I hope more students will begin to see the value in choice of what they read. I have a feeling we'll be having some presentations soon that show what students have been researching... My next goal is for those to be inspirational to other students so we can continue this trend of learning what we choose to learn.