This has been a hard “Spring” in some ways, but easier in others. One part of the “hard” has been the fact that I’m in one of the few local districts that still does a Spring Break aligned with Easter, and this year, that wasn’t until last week. Both students and adults were more than ready for a “time out” by the time that last week rolled around it was not pretty. Rather than focusing on that, I’m going to share this audio recording of class discussion on the Constitution I made on Friday which went pretty well. The kids have a less than perfect understanding of text, because we only had about 2 days with the selection they were reading on the subject (normally they’d have three or four).  I will just point to the fact that this discussion meets few of the Common Core standards in ELA of informational text, but it shows the higher level of thinking and the type of analysis that I’d prefer they make.

I was discussing this with my husband. He was a bit precocious as youngster, and once did a bang-up job on a history essay by adding some background information gleaned from his own reading (he has always read history for pleasure, not just when required to). His teacher was livid that he had included outsider information, and didn’t stick to the text. Once again, I’m not concerned that Common Core is something new and scary, but has the potential to be the same old same old.

California is like the rest of the country…only sooner

Image Credit: Number – 26 by szczel, on Flickr”