Did I Miss Something?

Okay, so honestly, I'm confused! I've seen some posts stating we're supposed to have all of our blog entries (which means all of our reading) done by today. I was under the impression that only our lesson plan was due today. The rubric shows the blog entries due "Before the travel seminar." Please tell me I have another month to finish reading. I just finished a couple of graduate classes and am finally looking forward to digging into these books (I'm sure some of you can relate). I've read Marzano (although I remember receiving an email stating we didn't need blog entries for that one), and have jumped into Battle Cry of Freedom. My mind has been swimming with information from my classes, so I've been looking forward to some uninterupted summer weeks to really get focused on this. Did I miss the boat on due-dates?

In case we're still supposed to post our lesson plan reflections, here's mine:

I actually really enjoyed this lesson. I’ve never explicitly taught analogies before, and when we did discuss them, it was always very simple examples. I had to think about responses to these which meant my students were definitely churning the gears. They actually seemed to enjoy making the comparisons, and I believe they gained a deeper understanding of not only analogies, but of the impact these character traits had on Lincoln as a man.

I believe this lesson was best served in the small group setting we conducted it in. It would have been difficult for many students to come up with comparisons on their own, but by bouncing ideas off each other, they were fairly creative. An example from one of the groups was, “After being defeated so many times in politics, running for U.S. President was to Lincoln as failing math a lot was to Albert Einstein.” Not bad for 5th graders! Granted, I had showed them that Foundation For A Better Life billboard during a community circle earlier in the year (the one that says, “As a student, he was no Einstein.”) during a Community Circle, but I was still impressed with the connection.