What a gorgeous day this has turned out to be! Hooray for sunshine!
We started our day in 6F with a writing exercise. Every now and then we do some writing to a prompt. This is a standard practice in grade 6 and is what we call a "CBM" (curriculum based measurement). Students are given a choice of 2 prompts. They write the prompt down, which is the beginning of a sentence. They are then given one minute to think and three minutes to write. I collect these and some of them are kept as data to show progress in writing.
After this, we looked at our writing benchmarks from September. Students were showed how they scored on these benchmarks and are now working on revising them to better pieces. It is my hope that they will use what I've taught them over the last month in writing to revise and edit these pieces. They will turn the revised pieces in for a grade. I'm hoping some of them will finish prior to parent conferences so that I can show you the improvements!
Also today, we had Mrs. Meserve come in (thank you!) to take each child individually and record them reading aloud. I will do some lessons on fluency and what reading fluently means soon. Students will then look at their videos and use a rubric to reflect on their fluency. We will upload these to our digital portfolios and write reflections in the near future.
In reading class, we continued our practice of writing a journal entry on the class blog. Students worked in pairs to finish what they started yesterday. They were not able to post to the blog until the entry was approved by an adult (Mrs. Bewersdorf or myself). We tried to guide them through the expectations of these entries where there is a 2 sentence summary followed by a response that focuses on one thing and gives examples from the book to back it up. This was difficult for many, but we worked through it and I'm hoping it will make a difference in the journal/blog entries that students do on their own starting next week.
We had a Fire Prevention Assembly this afternoon in place of science.
Please remember that Tuesday is Parent Conference Day. If you've forgotten your time, please let me know. There is no school this day.
