This morning I reminded everyone of the most valuable aspect of school: each year you get 4 clean slates! With the beginning of the 2nd marking period comes the opportunity to build upon the experiences from the last two months...

Math: We began unit two today and it promises to be a dandy one! 30 days of multiplication, division and variables... Today we actually broke into two different concepts based on last week's preassessment - the use of parentheses and solving for the unknown variable. There isn't a long-term implication actually - I simply got a head start on tomorrow's content for those who were ready. Consequently, we have two different assignments tonight that should be written correctly in their planners.

Language Arts: Although we're in a different quarter, our focus remains the same for a couple of weeks: reading for information. One thing that is becoming abundantly clear at this point is collectively, we are answering in generalities rather than illustrating these "generalities" using text-relevant support. Today we were trying to determine the main idea of an article about pest control on farms but when we were asked to "partner-up" and identify "important details" from the article each pair simply rephrased the overall theme from the text as opposed to locating evidence that supports the theme. The angle I've tried to play with this is to encourage them to think if their "important detail" begs additional questions or not...if it does, it could be too vague of a response. It's a bit confusing to explain it here but I'll likely illustrate it for you at conferences.

I do have new reading groups based on performance/experience thus far...not many changes but I did speak to each student who was switched. The switches are not permanent but reflect a better instructional environment for the time being based on my judgements.

With that said, each group has a new story that they should reread tonight for homework.