Motivation?

What motivates you? That was our morning question and while some answered their pets or video games, a few answered more thoughtfully with their parents, teachers, themselves or family. Just know that you are motivation for your child to succeed no matter if you realize it or not!

In academic block today, we began a new read aloud, The Beaded Moccasins by Lynda Durrant. It is based on the true story of Mary Campbell and has many, many Ohio connections. I use read aloud to model and springboard many teaching points. Today's lesson prompted quite a few discussions: language of the discipline with carding wool, fleece, lanolin, sheep dung :); details with the states surrounding Ohio and our Northern and Southern natural borders; setting of a story as the where and when; rules of what makes a novel historical fiction... students need to pick out an historical fiction book at their level (NO "I Survived" books as they are too easy) by Friday. We will be reading and working with these over the next few weeks for Any Book Book Club.
We got all the fourth graders together to review their topics for research. Students need to pick a Native American group from Ohio and create 3-5 questions to help guide their research. Next, they watched videos on ByrdseedTV to help them add depth and complexity to their research questions. Which group did your kiddo pick?

In math, my group is now a 4th and 5th grade multiage group! We have so many more 5th graders that their classes were huge so I took some leaders and created a 4/5 multiage group. Since we are all at the beginning of units, today, we completed one-pagers sharing any and everything they could possibly know about their topics. 4th grade worked with fractions and 5th grade worked with powers of 10 and decimals.

In meeting, I first showed the following picture and statement:

We discussed what this means and how this can help them. We even related it to advertising and how it's not necessarily false advertising but it isn't the whole picture. It was a great conversation that I hope many of them take to heart because they might not all be on social media now but they will be and need to value their worth!! Every Monday we share about our weekend and it gets really boring because some of them share every tiny detail..."I woke up and had breakfast and then watched YouTube..." So, I tried to make it a little more interesting today with them sharing an answer and we had to try and figure out the question. This was an epic fail!! They do not understand how to ask questions! This is something we will be doing again because it is a necessary skill in life! Sorry for all the exclamation points but it was so stressful. :( At the end of the day, we wrote our assignments down and then had some time to get caught up on work or continue our passion projects.