DAY 6 – Sept. 13/2016

LITERACY – Reading Comprehension

We learned about the difference between decoding and comprehension.

We looked more closely at comprehension by learning about the difference between finding literal meaning and finding inferred meaning

We continued to practice finding inferred meaning while reading independently. We set up a “Reading Comprehension Strategies” duotang to track all of the strategies we focus on during independent reading. Click on the gallery to zoom in on the examples.

DPA

We played soccer and various other games. The girls gathered together to have a pre-practice for Three Pitch (girls practised at break 1 with Mrs. Knight).

Also at break…a little water bottle “Jenga”?

Sound Field

The other day, we had sound field brought in to the classroom to help broadcast the teacher’s voice….or any student in the class making a presentation. One student thought Ms Fawcett looked like a “motivational speaker”…..which motivated Ms Fawcett to try to be more motivational! 🙂 Someone else thought she looked like a science presenter at a TED Talk. Our classroom should be so engaging! We will try!

Math – Patterning

We watched a video about engaging students in Math. The video is research based and comes from an amazing professor at Stanford University named Joanne Boaler. Jo’s website is called “youcubed.org” — check it out! One important piece of learning we had from Jo is that brain crossing — going across brain pathways — “helps us learn math more powerfully”.  Brain researchers have discovered that when we learn across both sides of the brain (symbols/numbers on one side of the brain……pictures on the other side of the brain) we actually engage THE WHOLE BRAIN in a better way and WE LEARN BETTER!

https://www.youcubed.org/students/

Speaking of using BOTH SIDES of our brain (logical/numbers & artistic/visual), we investigated the following page of number visuals from Jo Boaler in order to do some brain crossing. First we had to decide which side was the top of the page……….

Students could explain to their parents tonight how they figured out the top of the page, and how they decided to interpret the code.

Next, we worked in partners to answer the following question:

What do you see in the number visuals?

(Families, feel free to give your own answer in the comments section!!!!!!)