Day 4

Today, my students worked on the fifth chapter of the novel. I am still finding that students interest level concerning the novel is high; however some are feeling overwhelmed with the amount of blogging that takes place on a daily basis. For this reason, I am only having them respond to their teacher-partner. They do not need to respond to an additional person through blogging. Instead, I am letting the students verbally respond to other students' posts during class.



Students have improved in regard to describing the characters in the novel. I have asked them to use highly descriptive words to describe the characters, not words like nice, caring, kind, old, etc. Some students decided to use a thesaurus. The trend quickly caught on in the group, so I did a quick little lesson on how to use a thesaurus appropriately.

Now that students have shown improvement with descriptive words, I would like to see an improvement in the quality of questions that they generate. Many students are still posing very dry or superficial questions; however today, one of my students posed a great interpretive question. It was so good, that I decided to use it for the day's focus question instead of the one that I created. Tomorrow, I plan to use a think aloud strategy with my students to model good questions.



Students are still excited to see what their teacher-partners comments are. Many of the teachers are commenting that the students are able to make good inferences based on the information they are reading. The students are getting better at providing evidence, but it is something that I plan to work on after questioning. The teachers are prompting the students to discuss any themes that are emerging in the novel. So far, this has led to discussion on stereotypes.



Tomorrow, I plan to collect my students work to see how their guided notes are looking.