Quiet

The kids must be tired; it was a much quieter day today. 

Surprisingly, my favorite part of the day was Writers Workshop. We just started a historical fiction writing unit and I'm feeling good about the writing the students are doing and the brainstorming/help I'm giving them to get started writing. 

This is the first time I've tackled historical writing in English, and it helps that we've read a few historical fiction read-alouds. All those details help my kids figure out what to write. But I have a feeling I'm going to have to push them to add more historical details. I worked with one student who had quite a long story, but it could've taken place in any time period. If there's one, there's got to be another...

I caught a few students wasting time on their computers during rounds today. One kid said he was reading articles online (a task I'm very skeptical of, but a few of them have actually been reading news, so I let it go). This particular student had been staring at his spelling test audio file for at least ten minutes. Yeah, not a great move buddy. I kicked him off for the rest of the round and he snagged a book off the shelf to read. Or maybe 'read'. Not sure since I had to get back to the other student I was working with. 

The next round the same guy tried to pull the same trick again, reading articles. That stopped when I told him he could go back on his computer as long as he sat at the folding table with his screen out so I could easily see what he was doing. For some reason, he didn't want to do that... probably because it's not very comfortable. Guess he should've thought of that before messing around on the computer. I did a few random browser history checks of other students and they were all okay. A different kid I'd previously caught messing around took me up on the "sit at the folding table" deal and he actually read an article. 

Today is the last day of February. Last day to read. Tomorrow is the last day to turn in pages! I'm not sure how close to the goal we are... with the field trip yesterday and our two snow days last week, we're all playing catchup and no one has had a chance to tally the reading logs. I hope we make it. If not, we're not watching a movie Friday and that will be a bummer...