Tuesday on Tuesday!

Blog-reading parents! Make sure you read the very last big paragraph for a special offer...

We read (or in the case of my first class, reread) Terrible Things by Eve Bunting. It's a picture book, but one that is probably a little too intense for children. Terrible Things is an allegory where some forest animals and these mysterious amorphous Terrible Things represent the Holocaust. That was our launching point for our Holocaust unit which will consume a lot of the rest of our school year. The students jotted down some ideas about what the parts of the story could represent (they had interesting ideas about racism, people who are apathetic to problems that don't affect them, and intolerance) and wrote a speech from the Little Bunny's perspective.

We watched a Brainpop video that gave a pretty good overview of the Holocaust and looked at some definitions--prejudice, persecution, anti-Semitism, Aryan, ethnicity, Nazis, pogrom, and genocide.

I gave the students two things today. First, I gave them a research proposal half sheet. On that, they will narrow down their research topic (form the too-big Holocaust to something smaller and more manageable) and come up with some research questions or topic categories for it. They'll also write about their overall purpose and their audience. Some of them got a chance to look through some Holocaust materials. They'll continue to do that tomorrow as they look for topics.

Secondly, they got their independent reading stuff. That's a very small (1/3 sheet of paper) reading log that they can use as a book mark and a half sheet about the book they're choosing to read and what they are going to do with that book in order to get credit for reading it. As always, they are to read 30 minutes a night. It should be a very easy part of their grade.

The students did make a trip to the library to return and get books today.

In fact (and let's keep this a secret between me and you blog-reading parents), if your student just wants to read the book and make sure the reading log is filled out correctly, I will have no problem with that. The ultimate goal is reading, and if I'm seeing reading taking place, I'll be happy and have no problems giving them their points for the independent reading grade. So, blog-reading parent students only--read, show me your reading log every day, and don't tell anybody. We'll let those students who didn't bother sharing my blog address with their parents do the book reports.