Wednesday

HOMEBASE
Today we started using our MIR logs. You are supposed to fill in ONE BOX PER DAY in class. This is due on Friday and accounts for HALF of your "independent reading" grade. The other half of this grade comes from recording your home reading minutes in your planner. These are recorded on your punch card which is turned in every three weeks. You should be getting 300 minutes of home reading every three weeks (20 minutes a day x 5 days a week x 3 weeks).
HOMEWORK: 20 minutes reading and get planner signed.
B TRACK MATH
We got out the laptops today from our new mobile lab. (Ok, it's not really "ours" as in "mine", but it's "ours" as in "it lives in my room and I'm in charge of it".) Students who had their signed internet permission forms were able to complete my online survey. I would put another link to the survey here, but I am having some technical difficulties with it and will need to re-do it I'm afraid.


Next we started talking about "reading in math class". I have some wonderful reference books called "Math at Hand" that we will be using. You can buy one for home from Amazon.

HOMEWORK: For extra credit please leave a comment on the blog about what we have been doing in math this week. Have you learned anything about yourself? What are you excited to learn more about?

C TRACK MATH
We started our session with a problem of the day. (You can earn extra credit by doing this same challenge at home, but change the number in the problem. For example, use 4 checks and 4 envelopes or 10 checks and 10 envelopes. Some of you might even want to see if there is a predictable pattern for figuring this problem out.)

We also did the survey and "reading in math class" activities listed under B TRACK above.

HOMEWORK: Same extra credit as B TRACK above.

A TRACK MATH
We started with the same problem of the day that I linked to in C TRACK.

This is the last math rotation of the day and by this point I was very frustrated with how the survey wasn't working.

We focused completely on "reading in math class" today using the "Math at Hand" book referenced above. We divided up the reference pages at the beginning of the book and then "jigsawed" so that students became experts on one page and then shared that expertise with others in the class. Students learned about the other reference pages from other students. We also conducted a treasure hunt for information in the book. Finally we discussed text features such as headings, bold/italicized print, graphics, highlighting, etc. and found examples in the book.

HOMEWORK: same as other tracks.