The Day That the Lights Went out in Georgia

I got my first experience transitioning from three subjects in a row today. I went from my reading group, straight to science, and then to social studies. We made the transitions fairly smoothly. My goal is to keep them under two minutes and with minimal talking and moving around because as soon as one person starts talking or moves to another table, it catches like wildfire. We’ve been doing well on the time, but the noise can tend to start up sometimes. They received an x in their transition box for one transition, and that got their cooperation for the remaining transition times.

The most exciting, as in interesting, thing that happened today was that I had to readjust the science lesson immediately as science was about to begin. I came in from the hallway with my reading group as it was time to go into science, and my mentor teacher informed me that the bulb in the projector had blown. We are learning about plants and I had found an interactive sight where you can label the parts of a plant, and it tells you what those parts do once you have labeled them. I also had pictures of vascular and non-vascular plants to sort. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Fortunately, I had brought in some leaf samples to look at in addition to the plans. Also, the other fifth grade teacher had brought in some moss. So, I retrieved some microscopes and set up a mini lab session instead. We looked at the non-vascular moss first, read a page from our book and created Venn Diagrams for non-vascular and vascular plants, then observed the vascular leaves so that we could see which had veins (xylem and phloem) running through it.

We’ve began a new piece in writing, and I have high hopes for this piece. We have finally covered all of the 6+1 traits of writing, and thoroughly gone over organization and ideas. The students were given the option to use a prompt or make their story completely from scratch. Some children showed me what they have so far in order to get my opinion on how their pieces have started and I believe there are going to be some great pieces. I am also going to write a story, organizing my ideas by time, in a way that will hopefully show the kids how you can use typical organization, but still be original with it. I want to do this because I have learned that students writings can have creative, original ideas (sometimes not), but be displayed in a very bland manner.  (My story will be about my Monday, but my Monday begins on a Friday.

Here's the picture used for the optional prompt: