Making Discoveries About Adding Fractions

The Talking Has Got to Stop!!!  That is the theme of the day in Room #401.   There are a small group of boys who are having a hard time growing up and being positive, active participants in class.  I hope that in two weeks when we have parent/teacher conferences, we can have some discussions and move forward on better terms.

Regardless of these little interruptions, we managed to get a great amount of work done.  Here is what our jammed packed day looked like:

• 1st - Dance with Mr. Nunez.  We got a better report today than we did yesterday.  
• 2nd - Test Prep for ELA and then Book Clubs for the other half of the period.
• 3rd - ReadyGen Lesson 3A.8 with a focus on similes and metaphors to help paint pictures in writing so the reader gets a better understanding of the events.  Figurative language is so important so the more they are exposed to it, the better they will understand fiction writing and the more voice their own writing will have.  We also continued to work on writing opinion pieces and the steps to completing an opinion prompt.  Today we did a 10 minute quick write where they had to explain a simile and then form and opinion about it.  I can't wait to read their results.
• 4th - GoMath 7.3 with a focus on adding fractions with models.  Today was about exploration so I did very little "teaching" and more walking around and listening.  I like these days!  I hope they are formulating their own personal understanding of adding fractions!  We ended the session with a little math quiz to check for understanding followed by their vocabulary quiz (BAM! - back to back!) Each was actually quite short and they had plenty of time to study!
• 5th - Test prep for Math and then the rest of the period we went to the library to WAGGLE math.
• 6th - Lunch (after 3 attempts - they wouldn't stop talking so we returned to class and put our heads down and tried again, and again, and again!)
• 7th - Social Studies - Chapter 4 review and test!

Homework:

• ELA and Math Test Prep (1 questions each)
• Math - Practice Book 7.3
• Reading - Independently for 30-45 minutes!