I really dislike being absent. But obviously it happens, and I was out on Friday for the first time this school year. I'm looking forward to seeing the kids on Monday so they can let me know how the day went. I wasn't there to pick the Bucket Fillers of the week, so it looks like we'll have twice as many names in our Bucket Filler jar next Friday!

We started our fiction unit during reading block this week. We began with the features of fiction texts and focused on vocabulary like characters, setting, and plot. I introduced the typical plot structure of stories: introduction to characters and setting, conflict, climax, resolution. We ended up applying this pattern to comic strips, with the kids working in groups of three or four to label their assigned comic. These ranged from Peanuts to Denice the Menace to Calvin and Hobbes. This was definitely a challenging task, but many groups did a really nice job making sense of their strip and implementing what they learned. Students ended up using that information to write a brief summary. Summarizing is an important skill that can be tough for kids. I often tell them to pretend a friend asked them what happened in their book-- what would they say in response? This helps pick out the most important events in the story. In addition, remembering the elements and typical plot structure of fiction texts can be helpful in terms of selecting what information to include in the summary. 

On Wednesday this week, we worked on our communication skills while working in small groups through a team building task. Students had to work in groups of three or four to stack cups into a pyramid. The catch? They couldn't touch the cups; they could only touch a string attached to a rubber band to move them. In addition...they couldn't speak to each other! They could only use nonverbal communication to problem solve and exchange ideas. We ended up doing a second round in which they could speak. Mrs. O'Keefe and I have noticed that we need to work on kindness and compromise during small group work. We were on the lookout for positivity and encouragement between classmates, and in my room, Seriyah, Mason, and Brennan exemplified both teamwork and a growth mindset. 

This past week was the last one in our first three-week cycle of the school year for intervention block and the afternoons. Next week, we'll switch homerooms for those two timeframes, so I'll spend more time with Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom. For writing we began our focus on personal narratives, which syncs up quite nicely with our fiction unit in that strong narratives are stories with those same elements of fiction texts mentioned earlier. We also set up our 1:1 chrome books, which we're fortunate enough to have access to this year. We set up our bookmarks, downloaded some educational apps and extensions, and organized our Google Drive. Now we just have to start filling those folders with documents and projects galore!