Peer Conferencing

All week students have been busy meeting with a parter to revise and edit their rough draft.  The class was given a peer conferencing sheet where partners had to score one another from 1-5 for each of the 6 writing traits (conventions, organization, ideas, word choice, sentence fluency, and voice).  The sheet was set up so partners were "forced" to provide specific feedback - why they were giving the particular score and what advice they could give to improve the score.  After each conference, students were to go back to their rough draft and continue improving it, based on the given feedback.  This week students will be conferencing with a teacher and beginning their final copy.  

Saying Goodbye

This past week, Hunter moved away :(.  The day before his last day, we threw him a going away party.  One day I sent Hunter to the office to take the attendance, even though he wasn't the messenger.  As soon as he left I passed out paper and told the class to write him a goodbye letter and give it to me tomorrow.  At first, I felt bad about giving them such short notice.  That was until I realized that most of the class has a difficult time "acting normal" when Hunter would be around and keeping a secret.  No sooner, had I passed out the papers and had the children quickly hide it in their homework folders did Hunter walk in and all I heard was "Shh! Shh!  He's back!" Haha.  Hunter came in looking surprised, but sat down and finished up his morning work.  Then right before lunch came the "code word" for the letter, "Ummm...Mrs. Knoke? Can I come during recess to work on Project H?"  Luckily no matter how obvious I thought the class was being, it seemed Hunter didn't completely catch on.  


This past Tuesday, when the party was about to start I asked Hunter to get a book for me from another teacher.  As soon as he left the room we set up the food and drinks and turned off the lights. When he came back we all yelled SURPRISE!


Here is the book we put together:

I have no idea why some of these pictures came out upside down.  Sorry about that!

Some of the girls came in during recess to make him a banner. 

Here is the extremely blurry picture of Hunter coming back into the classroom. 

I had no idea how much some of the kids loved to bake!
Alex made donuts: 

Melissa made cupcakes:

Jennie made a cake:

Leah made me a birthday cookie that I just finished!

Eating!

All together one last time.  We'll miss you, Hunter!