Hip hoppin'

Every day in class we do what we call a "D.O.L."  I think that's suppose to stand for "Daily Oral Language," but there's not really anything oral about it.  Today I'm calling it "Daily Obsolete Language."  On each page the students have two sentences to fix, two analogies (a la teacher : student :: coach : ____ ) then there will sometimes be a geography question, and a math question.  Today's analogy read:

book : read :: record : _____

We go over our DOL's together as a class, so when we got to this, we discussed the relationship between books and reading, then I began the next phase by saying, "A record is what we had before tapes...which are was we had before CD's...which are what we had before MP3's.  Does everyone know what an MP3 is?"  I received a resounding affirmative response and so continued, "Ok, so if you read a book, what do you do with an MP3?" Most of my students said - appropriately - "listen" but one very bright young woman said, "rock out!"  And that immediately became the correct answer.  It was fun to look over their DOL's today and see "rock out" written on the page.  I love being the teacher.

Friday we had our end-of-lesson test for the story we were reading.  Our current unit in reading is about friendship, so there's always a general question about friendship in the test.  Their personal response question from this one was "Write about a time when you made a new friend."  My favorite response was, "When I moved to America from Californya." We're still working on geography...

The last three minutes of my school-day on Friday consisted of a dance party.  I think I might make that a weekly occurrence.