Tuesday, November 7

 Hi parents,

Today was a bit of a rough day for Room 6. In the morning, we revisited the idea of topic sentences, and 'hooks' in paragraph writing. For some reason this concept is really stumping the class. They seem to be stuck in a rut where they just hooked on whatever our last example was, and then just alter it very slightly, but not in a way that necessarily makes sense with their topic. So for example, if the example we brainstormed together was "Mmmmmm, do you smell cookies baking in the oven?" they might write, "Mmmm, school is fun." 

We've talked about how asking questions, using sound effect words,  and descriptive language is a good way to make your topic sentence engaging, but they seem to be struggling with applying those concepts to their own writing in a way that is natural and not forced. I think all we can do at this point is keep practicing and studying examples of good writing. I'm sure in time it will come, but the kids won't be too happy about having to keep working away at the same thing.

We encountered even more struggles in math today, with the classic word problem: "There are 92 red and blue marbles in a bag. At least 70 are blue. What combinations of red and blue marbles could there be?"

Only about 3 students were able to solve this problem. I was disappointed because it's not really that complicated of a problem, and I know the class is more than capable of doing the necessary adding or subtracting to solve it, but for some reason most of them just kind of gave up and sat there rather than trying different approaches. We eventually went over how to solve it, and tried an alternate version at the end of the day, which went a little bit better, but I don't want the class to only feel like they can do 'familiar' math. I want them to be creative problem solvers!

We had a talk about trying different things when your initial strategy doesn't work. Maybe tomorrow we'll teach strategies more explicitly. I hope the class takes it to heart. 

Tomorrow is also our review spelling quiz! Have a nice night,

Zac