Books!!!

 I had a student ask me out of the blue this morning if I had any more books in our class library like The Great Treehouse War by Lisa Graff. Well, of course. He wanted to get a list of books he might like to read so he's not rereading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books over and over. So he and I went to the realistic fiction shelf to take a look. I started at the top, scanning books, pulling the ones off the shelf that had a similar vibe to the ones he's already read and loved. Soon we had about ten books for him to check out. And then I kept finding just one more to add to the pile... and one more... and one more. He spent one of his read-to-self rounds just reading the inside flaps to see if he actually wanted to read them.  

He was thrilled. Pretty much all of them were yeses! He made a list of the books in the order he wants to read them, starting with books with the fewest pages so he can read as many of them as he can before the year is up. Best part: "Miss H, I made a big mistake earlier this year. All those nights sitting in the tractor during harvest, waiting for my dad? I should've brought a book along." *cue the halleluiah chorus* 

His excitement over books caught up the other 6th grade boy, who poked through the pile of possibility books. That kid asked me to write down a few of the titles for him to read next. (I keep a post-it note for each student in my 'meeting' binder that has books I think each student would like). What a glorious morning!

Well, it was the end of the quarter too, so a lot of them were stressed out about getting everything finished and turned in. All the 5-6th graders did! Only two had to miss any part of recess to get their work done. Now I have a giant pile of papers to correct... 

The other cool thing we did today was three word debates. We got the idea from our last read-aloud, No Talking by Andrew Clements. Earlier this week they signed up for topics, and today they went head-to-head only able to argue in three-word sentences. They did super well! I was impressed! Categories: should every 10yr old have a phone?, cats vs. dogs, beach vs. mountain, and should we have tests in school. All of them said it was harder than they thought it would be. And all of them want to do it again! I said next time we'll do it in actual debate format with teams and intros and full sentences with no word restrictions. 

At the end of the day, we looked at things through microscopes. I got all the old microscopes to work! We have two new ones purchased by our school/me a few years ago and four hand-me-downs from the public school (also from years ago). Of course the 5-6th graders had a blast and wanted to know if they can look through them again next week. Absolutely!