Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Second day in and I'm happy to report that the students are still stunned into silence. Maybe it's from a lack of sleep, maybe they are stunned by my utter brilliance, or maybe they are just that great at being exceptional students. Either way, they have proven to be hard working and quiet so far. I'm crossing my fingers that it lasts.

We have accomplished a lot in these first two days. Students have already completed a time capsule by answering some interest questions, taking some measurements, and writing themselves a note. We are going to lock this up and open it at the end of the year.

As a class, we have also taken a look at twitter. We learned about how to tweet and why people tweet. We even made our own handles, avatars, and tweeted about our first day at school. Today, we read some very short stories that people have tweeted. We practiced our skills in visualization as we listened to these short tales. It was interesting to "see" the different ways that people visualized the stories.

Today we began to create our classroom goals. I presented the students with seven questions:

What should kids in our class be doing to make sure our classroom runs as smooth as possible?

Our classroom should be ______ everyday.

School is important because ___________.

What is one of your overall goals for this year in sixth grade?

What will you need to do to achieve that goal?

Write one goal you have for yourself after you graduate high school.

What will you need to do to achieve that goal?

They wrote their answers on sticky notes and added them to the posters. Tomorrow, we will look for trends in our answers and use these to guide us in creating our class goals which we will refer to all year to keep us on track.

If you have not handed in your parent questionnaires yet, please do so. Thank you.