Today we spent some time scoring another student's story. You can find that story here. We used the Organization rubric to decide:

* Was the story easy to follow—like having a road map? Nothing is out of place.
* Did everything connect? Was it is easy to see how one thing connected to another?
* Was there a lead that caught your attention—one that makes you want to read on?
* Was there a strong ending—making the paper unforgettable?

Once we scored it, I taught the children how to be a good peer editor. We wrote down three things:

*- One thing you really liked about the story.
(I say this story was organized. It was easy to see how one thing connects to another.)

:) - One suggestion. Describe one thing you believe the student should do to improve his score on the Organization rubric.
(I said we needed to work on making the beginning a bit more interesting.)

?- One question. Here we wrote down a question we had about the piece. We could ask the author to clarify a part of the story that didn't make sense.

In math, we talked about how to use a map scale. We looked at several maps online and examined the map scale at the bottom. If you look at page 95 in your math journal, you'll see a map of the United States with a map scale in the bottom left hand corner. If you measure the line segment, you'll see that one inch equals 300 miles on this map. We used rulers to measure the distance between certain locations (page 96) and calculated how many miles there were between them as well.

We talked about the phrase "as the crow flies". It means that the distance between two locations normally includes lots of turns...and there really isn't a straight road between them. However, if we could fly between locations, we could make a straight line..."as the crow flies." That would be the shortest distance.

We also completed the math boxes on page 97 of the math journal as well.

I shared a brief power point...mostly...with the class today. Please see it below. We will be talking about Author's Purpose later this week.

During rotation today, we discussed our Judy Blume book and continued to finish up assignments (glogs, proper nouns worksheets, Fudge questions).

Tomorrow, we will be starting a new story and viewing Timucua glogs! Yahoo!!!!