Week 3 - Meredith

This past week went great for me. In language arts we continued reading View From the Cherry Tree and the students seem to be enjoying the story a lot. Every day I have kids asking me if we're going to read another chapter and Willo Davis Roberts does such a great job at writing and leaving cliff hangers at the ends of the chapters that the kids always want to read another chapter as well.

I had Dean come in to observe me this week. It was nerve wracking at first, but I was confident about my lesson, so it wasn't too bad. The lesson he saw was over different Encyclopedia Brown stories. The students were broken into 7 groups and each group read a different mystery story. They were in charge of reading the story in their groups and creating a chart that had been modeled with a previous story. They had to write down on their chart the detective, the crime, the evidence, the suspects and what they thought the solution was going to be. Once they had read their story and completed their chart, they got the solution to their mystery and had to write down the clues Encyclopedia Brown used to solve the mystery. The lesson went super well and I was pleased with the group work that I saw during the lesson. Dean also had positive things to say to me about the lesson.

In social studies we finished up our PowerPoint presentations and reviewed for the test, which they took on Wednesday or Thursday, depending on which class they were in. They did well on their tests, which was exciting for me to see. (Although I don't put much weight on the test grades, because it was only 14 questions and they were all multiple choice.) On Friday we had a colonial celebration and the kids got to make corn husk dolls and eat colonial type food - cookies, corn bread, spiced cider and bacon. They had a great time and it was a great way to spend a half day.