Transfer

Students giving peer feedback to each other's writing and drawing about a demonstration of the law of the conservation of matter.

Homework:
Study your spelling words!
Math: none for fourth grade, fifth graders do one page of differentiated packet
Read! 20+ minutes and do the response journal on your weekly planner

A few thoughts on the problem of transfer...
We teachers are guilty of teaching lessons. I say guilty because they are less something. Like less than real life. 

We try to take skills out of their real life contexts and teach them in isolation. Then we ask students to apply them in a bigger context and wonder why they can, for example, spell the homophones perfectly in the lesson or the workbook but repeatedly fail to spell them in their own writing. What are the factors that contribute to students' ability to transfer skills and knowledge learned in a practice, or lesson, setting to other or larger contexts? This is a thread I will chase in the next few blog entries (and continue to chase every day in my teaching!)