We reviewed the progress on Jackson's short story, "The Subway Murder." Jackson's story is off to an excellent start--his hero, a Chicago detective named Joe, receives a middle-of-the-night phone call from his Captain directing him to investigate a murder on the subway. Joe gets dressed and races to the scene of the crime. Jackson continued to write about the crime scene investigation.

We read aloud to articles; what is a stock?, why invest in stocks? We stopped at points in the reading to stress important terms and concepts. Jackson completed post-reading multiple choice questions. I asked him to share/think aloud related to how he determined/chose the best answer. Last, we looked at his account balance and portfolio.

We began class discussing the poems Jackson has read these past two weeks and which was his favorite. He chose "The Road Not Taken," and we talked about how the language and format are simple and straightforward. After that, Jackson wrote his own short poem on ice cream (so creative!). I showed him how using punctuation, line breaks, and repetition, he could give the poem a specific rhythm and flow. Jackson is now working on a limerick.

Jackson read two short stories today: Through the Window and Frederigo and the Falcon. Each has elements of irony in them. We discussed how irony is used in each and compared the latter to our earlier study of The Gift of the Magi.

Jackson was absent today.

Jackson makes sketches with dimensions of his cricket bat and triangle peg game he made earlier in the school year. He then views a construction video of the New Yankee baseball stadium. Excellent session.

Today we reviewed the parts of the body with a song and we labeled a diagram of the body. Also, we did a Mother's Day card and learned about the history behind it.

Rationalizing the denominator with a single term and double terms in the denominator (intro to conjugates).

We talked about series circuits versus parallel circuits.

Jackson read the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. We discussed in depth the antagonist and protagonist characters and the moral codes they lived by.