Day 7

Days 4, 5, and 6 will be skipped. I was too tired! In summary, students shared their Me Bags (five items they brought in to tell about themselves) on Thursday, and on Friday we went over our interviews of someone 55+ years old. That was really awesome and was a great way to tie the lesson to the standard course of study (Goal 2 for Social Studies).

Yesterday I was starting to feel a little sick, and today I'm getting worse. All those germs are warring against me it seems. Yesterday we started math rotations and I taught a game practicing place value. I have continued to teach cursive, and we're finally about half way through the lowercase letters. Soon enough we'll be able to write any word we wish, just not capitalized. Yesterday we started the science kit on the human body. We discussed the importance of bones in the body and directly met the standards. We also learned how to take observations while doing an experiment - jumping rope.

Today we did a real experiment - we dissected owl pellets. In case you don't know, owls eat their food whole - digest what they can - then about 20 hours later regurgitate a "pellet" consisting of the parts of the animal they cannot digest (fur, bones, claws, teeth, etc). Luckily, I did this same experiment when I was in 3rd grade, so I was already a little familiar with it, but still, that was 10 years ago. The students did very well with their lab partners and made great connections to the human body. It seemed a little chaotic, but my teacher and I concluded that for the nature of the beast, they did a great job and didn't get out of hand at all.

One thing that I've been learning and growing at since day one is how to break things down step by step for third grade. After working with sixth grade last year, I was well adjusted to giving three or four directions at once and students completing them almost immediately. Third graders are a lot slower and need more directions. When I'm lesson planning, I really have to stop and think about how I should break tasks down into smaller and smaller steps so that I'll have their attention and we'll all stay on the same page. Thankfully, whatever isn't planned out seems to come natural to me - I can notice/decide very quickly to change the directions to better suit their attention spans.