Saturday, September 3, 2011

Off My Planned Track, but on Irene's

The best laid plans...learned a lot about that over the last week or so. I took all that time in planning out my notebook and setting up the first few weeks of the school year and Irene made her appearance. While we didn't get any rain here in the Smoky Mountains, the Outer Banks of North Carolina really were impacted by the hurricane as was Lewes, Delaware where my mom and brother's family live. So, we did some hurricane work. We started with looking at the projections on Weather Underground and then we used the coordinates found on that site and a tracking map to keep track of the hurricane. We also graphed the central air pressure and wind speed that went a long with the coordinates. I did have my students put both of these into their notebooks as well as writing a key question.

I also have to use the Comprehension Toolkit Strategies even though I don't teach reading so I pulled some articles on hurricanes and used these as well while my students tracked their thinking. We also made some anchor charts. The students taped their tracking map and graph into their notebooks and also put their post it notes from the article into their notebook. We are just finishing up our conclusions and reflection. I will post photos then.

We'll get back on track this week. They were so interested in the hurricane, a lot of them followed it last weekend and have been looking at the storms developing in the Gulf and Atlantic this week. It was well worth it. When we get into air pressure and the water cycle in the next month or so, I'll be looking at how they make these connections back to Irene. So while this threw me off track, my students were really excited about science this past week.

We also worked on our notebook covers here and there. I did a lot of modeling, since I always make my own cover as an example of how to make a collage. We cut out a lot of the pictures during class time and then start laying out the full collage. This coming week they will be finishing them at home and have them back in class by Friday.