Seventh Day of School

Today's bonus question worked so well, we'll try to repeat it again tomorrow. Tomorrow the students will be asked if anyone knows two more story elements besides plot. The answer to this question is: I know that character and setting are two more story elements besides plot.

Today we began work on our second Thinking Map, the Circle Map where our topic was ourselves. These will be used to complete our upcoming Unit Project.

In math we worked on building physical representations for the number 8. Tomorrow we will learn how to record the information from our models on paper. Students who are able to successfully record a complete and organized set of number models will earn a rubric score of 4 on their math report. Students completing 5 examples will earn a score of 3.

A note about homework: on last night's homework, the final question was an open ended response question with two blank lines. These lines on the homework should indicate to parents that some type of explanation is required. Here are some examples of very good responses received:

• I know 8 is the other part because 8 - 0 = 8.
• If one part is the same as the starting number, then the other part has to be 0.
• If the whole is 8 and one part is 8, the other part has to be 0 because 8 + 0 is 8.

Please note: it is unnecessary to spell out numbers unless a number starts the sentence. Complete answers should not start with the word because. I will be speaking more about how to answer these open ended response questions at Back-to-School Night. Homework that is returned due to incomplete or incorrect answers should be corrected and returned to class for credit.