The school was on high alert today - the Superintendent was coming in to visit each classroom! It is his first year as Superintendent of Schools in Newton, and he is going around to every classroom in each school to get to know the lay of the land. Love it!
Science:
We started off with science today, and the Superintendent happened to stop by during the lesson. Before he arrived, Ms. Wink reviewed the three parts of a Testable Question: materials (what you can use), problem (what are you trying to do), and the criteria (what it successfully has to do).
When the Superintendent did pop in, Ms. Wink had the students explain what the lesson was all about. She also proceeded to have him hold out his arms and she stacked 6 dictionaries on them to demonstrate how much weight one index card had to hold.
Math:
We continued the mean/median/mode lesson by learning all about the median. Median: the number in the middle of the data set. Dr. Morse again had fun act-out activities for the students to demonstrate. She passed out index cards with numbers on them to create a student data set at the front of the classroom. After a student "dismissed" equal numbers of students from each end of the data set (with a magic wand, of course!), the remaining student put on a monkey mask, and Dr. Morse and I played "monkey in the middle" by throwing a ball around that student. Hilarious! Dr. Morse also explained what to do when there is an even-numbered data set and you end up with two medians - take the average of the two numbers and you've got the correct median.
It's so funny to me that I feel so much more confident correcting the math work than I do the spelling or grammar...kind of the opposite of most girls (sadly - come on gals! let's love math!).
Social Studies:
We continued the text book scavenger hunt - and Ms. Conrad had to leave the room for a moment to take care of an issue. She let me take over the microphone (literally, all teachers use microphones when instructing during class to help the hard of hearing students), and engage the students in a discussion about the answers and the searching strategies they used. The students got really into it, and the one student who is usually tough to get involved/interested was contributing the entire class! He even took over the microphone on two occasions to answer the question. It was great to see him be so engaged in class.
Towards the end of the day, I read another chapter of "Night of the Twisters" to the students. The book is getting good...the weather is starting to change, and the twister is about to hit.
At the very end of the day, the student mentioned earlier made an announcement about the number of challenge tickets that have been collected thus far - 123! He also announced the top three challenge ticket holders in a very creative and dramatic way. I think this student is starting to find his niche, and the class is starting to see more of his personality and is becoming more open to getting to know him. He still has bad days (like yesterday when he stormed out of my lesson), but days like today are so thrilling to see.
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