Monday, September 12, 2005

Monday Moaning? Not here!

It was a delight to see everybody back at school for our second week. Our class is starting to settle into their new routine.

We began our day with Reader's Workshop. Students are starting to have conferences with me after they read their books. We then continued on to our Open Court block. We completed our Concept/Question board just in time for a visit by Mrs Oh and the new "literacy coach," both of whom seemed reasonably impressed. We also discussed a little bit about point-of-view. This is a hard concept for students to really grasp. They superficially can scan for words like "I" or "me" or "our" to determine the narrative voice, but they start to get really confused when we add dialogue to the story. We'll be working on this all year. We concluded with some writing time before recess.

After recess, we continued our unit on plants by starting to study photosynthesis. We then took off to the Tech Center where the students began to learn touch typing. After lunch, we did some relay races as part of PE time. This was interrupted, though, by a power failure which caused the fire bell to rang. The students (and staff) were more than a little confused by all this, but room 19 students were calm and cooperative.

We're coming to the end of the first chapter in the math book. Again, though we've stressed the distinction between digits and numbers, the students will not have a really deep understanding of this for a while. We'll keep talking about place value until the very last day of school.

Homework: (1) Study the spelling list. (2) "Understand 10,000," Math book, page 11, all problems. (3) "Logical Reasoning," page 13, numbers 1-7 only.

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