A city buildings model the girls made with a friend.The boys have reached a unit of their English textbook where they have a passage about the riches of the rainforest. The passage is written in a brief, breeze through magazine style, with lots of extravagant adjectives to make up for lack of depth. Doing a comprehension on this is fine,doing some adjective related work is fine, but later in the unit the writing task is to prepare an argument to persuade others of the need to stop the destruction of the rainforest. This strikes me as a bit sudden. Asking a child to prepare a persuasive argument on something he knows very little about, something he has only read a few colourfully sensationalised facts about a couple of days ago, does it make sense? Writing an argument like that should come at the end of several weeks study of the topic at least, surely? It can't be good precedent to encourage argument without understanding. In the next exercise they are asking for a poster design to make clear why destruction of the rainforest is an "international disaster". I'm not suggesting that it isn't a disaster by the way, I'm just suggesting that this topic needs much more depth than could be offered in the context of literacy lessons. "International disaster", big words that require serious consideration.Writing an argument is a very good skill of course, but I would think that it is best done in a cross curricular way, using a topic that can be studied in more detail.
I don't even know why I care about that textbook.
Ia was up early this morning, so I did some work with her first. Slowly but surely the phonics is coming along, alhamdulillah. Later in the day we did a little work on number bonds for 8. Colouring in a strip of 8 squares (drawn on squared paper) to match 6+2, 4+4 and so on.
The boys finished the last section of the Engineering Interact activities, did some more on the Yusuf (as) lapbook, plus their other daily activities.
It was a lovely day here, maashAllah, the boys went cycling in the evening and all the children played in the garden until almost maghrib.
1 comment:
no you're not, you are just using your brain and thinking more laterally than the author of that book I expect. A disaster for an 8/ 9 year old will mean something a lot different.
S was interested in the food crisis news and wanted to know the reasons etc. Lots of topics there, even for us adults to get to grips with. He went on to add, 'well it hasnt been talked about in Sweden'. Maybe thats because I don't have the will to watch the news in Swedish on a regular basis at the moment as brain is not at its best!
Post a Comment