Have You Seen Last Week?

Another week zoomed by and with it the end of the nine week grading period. That sort of snuck up on me. Nevertheless, it's been a great first nine weeks and another great week.

We started the week by going over our Parts of Speech Quiz. The scores were pretty bad across the board. I thought that perhaps some of the errors were simple mistakes. I had planned to review and then retest, but when we talked about it, it seemed that simple mistakes were only part of it. A lot of them admitted to still being confused about the basics, so we're going to do some extra review before we retest.

After we went over our quiz, we got back to work on The Odyssey. We're still working with our reciprocal teaching circles. It's been going well from my vantage point. The students are discussing and helping each other make sense of the poem. Some of them aren't so crazy about the poem, but that's mostly because they have to work so hard to make sense of it all.

Later in the week we continued working on The Odyssey. We nearly finished the cyclops episode. I assigned the rest of their five jobs for homework. We'll be splitting the remainder of the poem up between the groups. Each group will read their section/sections and present the information back to the rest of the class.

We started our Parts of Speech review by playing MadLibs. It was a lot of fun and educational. We got to review what the parts of speech were and have fun using them. My plan is to move from playing MadLibs to creating our own. This way the students will have to know what part of speech they remove. We'll go full circle.

Friday we went to Grandfather Mountain. It was a lot of fun even if we could hardly see anything. The mist or fog was thick. We couldn't even see off the bridge or the rocks on the far side. It was like being on an island. Before we went to the bridge, we did get a chance to see the animals and the museum. All in all, it was a good day and another good week!