Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Pantomime, part 2

Today we started off with theater class with Mr. Pratt. Our students did a truly exceptional job here today! I was so proud of their focus and willingness to take risks without hiding behind acting silly. I will film some of their pantomimes this week and put them on the blog by the weekend.

When we returned to class, we continued our work on visualization that we started yesterday. The students took out the post-it notes they wrote yesterday and reviewed the descriptive language which they had picked out of the story. They then created a picture based only on the words on the post-it notes and their memories of the story. They were not allowed to look at the illustrations. Fourth graders have a terrible tendency to just try to copy what the illustrator did if they have the opportunity. When deprived of the book, they do interesting and creative work as you can see above.

In the afternoon we checked homework, went to PE, corrected last week's math test, and practice our body percussion pieces. These too will be videotaped and posted on the blog as soon as I can. They look like they will also be excellent.

Homework: I decided they deserved a lighter than normal night tonight. My friend Ann Kim, who works in Turkey for the Department of State, is coming to visit today, and I figured if I wasn't going to do any work tonight, they could also have an easy day! So just two math assignments: (1) Do "Greater Numbers," Math, page 46, number 7-33 only and (2) do pages 14 in the Problem Solving Workbook, numbers 1-6 only. That's just 32 problems and it should not take more than a half hour if they're working hard!

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