Dylan and I had a great conversation about the duality of man and the how that theme plays out in the book. He's done a great job with the reading, and I was very pleased with the way he uses the lesson of the book to talk about the bigger ideas and themes. Excellent work!
Today, I had Josh participate in a critical thinking exercise by making him write for about 3-4 minutes on topics like the death penalty, assisted suicide, obesity, Obamacare, homosexuality, etc. Afterwards, I had Josh read his responses to me, and I had him consider some of the gaps in his reasoning. For example, I had him provide a concrete, explicit measure for how assisted suicide was different from Hitler's euthenasia program, which essentially "mercy-killed" people who were deemed old, disabled, sickly, etc. The point was not to prove one point-of-view right and the other wrong, but to help Josh qualify his arguments, noting that sometimes disparate ideas can stem from the same basic concept.
Grace began her session by listening to a holiday book called Auntie Claus. Before reading we predicted what the story might be about and things that could happened based upon the title and cover art. Grace did very well picking out the 4 items that belong on the title page of a book. Grace was an active listener during the story and was willing to discuss the storyline as it unfolded. She was also able to list the characters, setting, problem and solution after reading the story. Grace enjoyed the story very much and was able to have a wonderful discussion about the lesson that the main character learns in the story...It is better to give than to receive. Following our reading discussion, we went to the computer lab where Grace read 2 different Raz Kids leveled readers and took the comprehension quizzes for both. We worked on fluency and decoding skills while Grace was reading. We will continue to work on both of these areas.
Ashley began her session today by playing a game called Wingo. The game consists of dominos with different chunks of blends and word families. The object of the game is to build the longest domino word train. Ashley worked hard to remember the many different phonics rules and apply them to help build words successfully. After playing Wingo, we played a quick math fact game. Ashley needs to practice her math facts and this game is a fun way to do it. We ended her session by reading a book called, The Little One. The story is about an orphaned red-tailed monkey and a sweet little girl that becomes her temporary mother. Ashley really enjoyed reading the story and had many inquisitive questions.
read/discuss Lord of the Flies
write about 'the beast"
Dylan continues to do a good job with Lord of the Flies. He had a little trouble with the writing, but only because it was a little different than what's he's used to. But he didn't waver and gave an excellent effort. I'm very pleased with his work on this book so far.
Science; Continued viewing Prehistoric animals, showing how fossil impressions are made in rock during Triassic Period. Yanuell had fun with plastic dinosaur figures making his own impressions in play-doh. Very good day.
Today, I decided to try stretching Josh's critical thinking comfort level with a 20 minute free-writing lesson. To do this, I gave Josh a list of 6 random topics and gave him about 3 minutes to write anything that came to his mind for each one. Topics ranged from "The Medieval Period," to "My Family," "College," and even "Video Games." My goal was to get Josh to focus/hone these topics, centering his ideas on particular facets of each. Afterwards, I had Josh read all of his answers and found that he made some pretty interesting connections in topics. I then created a case scenario for Josh: college professor says write an argument paper about anything that you want. Using the previous topics, I asked Josh to move from topic to focus to argument, deciding on a claim that was defendable. We had a really good time of doing this, and Josh was able to articulate some really interesting claims based on this free-writing assignment.
Ashley has been excited to play some math games and I had promised her that this week we could start with some math enrichment as a warm-up activity. We played a Thinkfun dice game called Math Dice Jr. The game involved multi-step addition problems in order to move through the game board. Ashley loved playing the game and the practice with her addition facts was needed. After playing the game, we moved onto phonics and decoding skills. We created a grid to help work on the different sounds that the bossy r makes. Ashley enjoyed the "craftiness" of this project because she loves anything involving fancy crayons.
Grace and I began our session by playing a phonics game called, Digraphs in Space. Grace did a wonderful job practicing the different digraphs and the sounds that they make. While playing we brainstormed other words with the same digraphs. We ended our session by looking at the song books on the Raz Kids program. Grace was very excited to see that she could read and learn songs and sing them all within the program.
