Journals

We've spent time each day really looking into the different ways journals can teach us. On Monday, we spent time writing an entry in our math journal. Math journals are a great tool for getting us to think about the math that we do...how we feel about it, the strategies we use, lingering "I wonder" questions, and ways we can use the information in the real world, among others. Often, when we write about something, it causes us to have "realizations," as one student put it. After viewing a math journal entry from Mr. Hass's class on multiplication, we wrote our own thoughts about division. The responses were so thoughtful. To name just a few-- Darius talked about many emplorers using division in the real world for budgeting, Maile wrote out the division trick "Does McDonald's Serve Burgers" (ask your kid what that stands for!), and Kamryn wrote about division being repeated subtraction.



Journals have often been a keystone for us in social studies lately, too. After reading about Washington's appointment as General, we wrote what we thought he might say in a journal entry if he had one. We shared some of our responses and then read what he really wrote. We were shocked that he only wrote the weather and where he had dinner! Can you imagine just being named General of the army during the Revolution and only writing that it was a warm day? We also looked at a soldier's journal entry from after the Declaration was read to his brigade. We all enjoyed the "three Chears" he wrote about (even though we noted that his spelling, punctuation, and capitalization through the entry weren't correct) and had our own chorus of "Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!"



Of course, one of our main focuses in our astronomy unit is our moon journals. Each night, we are looking up at the night sky and recording our observations through sketches and notes. We are truly becoming astronomers. I anticipate that each day, our responses will become more thoughtful, and we will notice increasingly sophisticated features of the night sky. I hope that this will be a special, meaningful experience for you as a family as looking at the moon becomes a nightly ritual. I know that we as a class will grow as astronomers, observers, and thinkers.