Our Work with The Phantom Tollbooth Begins

Today we started our work with Norton Juster’s classic, The Phantom TollBooth. We did a lot of things to get us ready for this including careful observations of paintings by Salvador Dali (e.g, The Persistence of Memory) and a close reading of Abbott and Costello’s skit, “Who’s on First.” In addition we deconstructed how puns are largely based on homophones, homographs and idioms.

The hard work paid off and the student’s understanding of how author’s use word play to cause humor and confusion allowed for a successful launch of The Phantom Tollbooth.

Our Focus on Fractions

A big part of having a successful 5th grade year is being able to add, subtract, divide and multiply mixed numbers and fractions. To the credit of the students, we are quickly marching through this content and the students are doing extremely well with the first part, adding and subtracting mixed numbers. This success, will allow us to then move to the operations, division and multiplication. Moreover, with the right foundation, students will enter the middle school years ready for rates, ratios and proportional reasoning.

DiscussionThe first two weeks with fractions was largely conceptual with students creating models on how to add and subtract fractions. Now, students are using more traditional algorithms—the way their parents learned—with a great deal of success.

B.B.Wolf Wins: Our Visit to Judge Pearson’s Courtroom

Thank you to all the families who were able to join us for Kids Court. The day involved meeting Judge Scott Pearson, putting on a mock trial, and learning more about the Washoe County jails and judicial process.

Certainly, the highlight was the trial and ultimately B.B. Wolf was awarded the $3100 in damages he was seeking.

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Learning how clocks measure the Sun’s movement

Today we learned how to build a sun dial and measure the Sun’s apparent movement. The study began with learning about why people needed to measure time and how Egyptians, measuring the number of finger segments in two hands settled on 24 hours in a day. If you don’t know how the Egyptians did this, it would be a great question for your kid.

A Visit from NevadaTeach

Today we got a visit from University of Nevada Reno students and the NevadaTeach program. It was a chance to work with engineering standards and learn to use the Richter scale by modeling earthquakes.

The NevadaTeach program is a great way of getting science and math students into Washoe’s classrooms.

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A Game of Catch via Socratic Seminar

Today we did a Socratic Seminar with Richard Wibur’s A Game of Catch. This is a particularly difficult text that requires some time to fully understand and comprehend. Although the story is pretty straight forward, the subtext or hidden message, takes some effort to get to.

To the credit of the students, they got there. They saw the symbolism of the apple tree and what it meant that Scho ends the story by saying, “I want you to do whatever you’re going to do for the whole rest of your life!”

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Using a “Fishbowl” to Enhance our Discussions

Today we engaged in a “fishbowl” to debate the pros and cons of having classroom pets. We used materials that presented both sides of the issue and students annotated and rehearsed making claims from either perspective.

We read through three articles over the week and today we employed the instructional strategy. Students in the fishbowl debated the issue and could sub themselves out for someone on the outside who wanted to make a point.

All of this work allowed the students to complete a piece of writing on the topic. And the writing? It is pretty fabulous.

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