Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. -- W. B. Yeats

Above is The Hiawatha Wampum Belt symbolizing the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy.

What a day! The sixth grade had an (slightly) extended morning since the fifth graders were busy working on PPPs. We began work on our Personal Mission Statements today--wait until you see them! I am always impressed with the thought that goes into these very personal documents!

There was no Social Studies today other than (Grade 6) discussing the reading and going over the assignment from yesterday. The reading was about the Iroquois Confederacy. It's amazing to note that it was the model for our country's democratic representative government. Additionally, the Iroquois had no written language so their Constitution, which consisted of 117 sections, was recorded by stringing white and purple shell beads, called wampum, into belts and then MEMORIZED! For fun, I told the kids to look on the links or click here to create their own (virtual) wampum belt.

We continued independent reading and concluded a Reading Survey for the DRAs today. Remember, the second book needs to be read in order to complete a book project next week. Keep reading!

In Grade 5 Language Arts, we corrected and discussed yesterday's assignment about nouns after their DOL and 7-minute writes. We concluded with a fun activity of trying to come up with at least 3 nouns that began with each letter of the alphabet. It will ultimately provide review for parts of speech AND be a segue into figurative language... You'll see.

Time to go home. I hope you all have a pleasant evening; I'll check in again tomorrow.

Teri