Day 6

Over the past five days, we have seemed to fall into a routine which is working well. Students come in to class, get a computer, and check out the new posts on the blog. This is followed by a short discussion of the blog. Students comment to one another regarding the ideas they have posted. Then, we read a new chapter from the book.

Today, I read chapter seven aloud to the students. As usually, students then reread the chapter as they took guided notes. While students were silently reading, I worked with the two students that were still having trouble developing good questions. Instead of them reading the chapter silently, I had them take turns reading aloud. This allowed them to verbalize their questions as we read. When everyone had finished this, I had the students go around in a circle and share their questions. We briefly discussed the "juicy" questions together.

Today, I decided to work on creating better written answers. I presented the students with the focus question for the chapter: What does Virgil mean when he says he is mad at his father and also feels sorry for him? I then gave students time to write their answers (I called it a rough draft for their blog.) When students finished writing, I had them grab a highlighter. I asked the students to highlight their own thoughts/inferences in one color and to highlight evidence from the book in another color. This worked really well! Some students found that their answers were made up of exclusively their own thoughts. Other students realized that they had a lot of evidence from the book, but none of their own thoughts. I then told the students that they should try to have a balance of their own ideas and evidence from the book when they construct an answer to the daily focus questions.

A few students already had a good balance of ideas and evidence, but their answers could still be made better. I noticed that a couple of students had all of their ideas at the beginning of the paragraph and all of the evidence at the end of the paragraph. Their writing will improve if they learn to weave the evidence in directly after their own thoughts. This will be something that I watch for over the next few days.