Monday, January 30, 2006

An Altogether Admirable Day

We had a great beginning to this last week of the first month. After silent reading, we started on a new story in Open Court Reading. It's called "Roxaboxen." It tells the story of how a group of children in Arizona or New Mexico about 75 years ago created an imaginary town called Roxaboxen. They remembered this years and years later and told their grandchildren about htis experience. It's a wistful, charming tale with nice illustrations. We also listened to a good bit of The Wind in the Willows, too.

After recess, we continued our work in Music. We're learning a rondo in body percussion, and we've mastered the "A" sectiond.We also continued our work with our birthday compositions. This was a fun way to compose a melody. Students were given this chart of a pentatonic scale:

do re mi so la
F G A C D
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 0

They then turned their birth date into numbers. For example, my birthday July 4, 1957 became 07041957. In notes it then became D G C C F C D G. Students took turns on the glockenspiels "playing their birthday." Above you can see a picture from last week when we did this the first time and they used xylophones.

We went to the Tech Center where we (almost) finished putting our rough drafts of our fantasy stories into Appleworks. Typing them up will make doing second (and third and fourth and fifth) drafts much easier.

After lunch, we continued our kickball unit mixing with students from room 17. In math, we studied fractions of sets. This is kind of a hard thing for students to get. It seems logical to us that 1/3 of 6 is 2: as a adults we just see it. But children have a hard time visualizing this. They may need some handholding with this tonight.

Homework: (1) Study spelling. (2) Multiplication worksheet (3) Subtraction with regrouping worksheet (4) Fractions of a group, Math, page 486-487

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