Thursday, February 12, 2009

Ordinary…and Out of the Ordinary

This was mostly a pretty ordinary Thursday. We did Independent Reading. We read our literature circle books. And we read and critiqued each other’s place I love papers. We corrected and discussed our math homework. We finished reading and discussing a chapter in the history book on the Gold Rush. We also practiced some of the songs for Gold Dust or Bust.

But Thursdays are also art day, and that always has some surprises for the students. And in that way, Thursdays are never completely ordinary. We are working on the concept of form right now, and we tried making sculptures today. Now we are not rich enough in room 19 to give every child a piece of Carrara marble, nor is the teacher foolish enough to give hammers and chisels to nine-year-olds. So we made our sculptures out of soap. And the students had fun with this. You can see how intently they carved their soap.

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And they were pretty pleased as the outlines of an animal started to emerge from the bar of soap.

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We’re not quite finished with this project yet. We’ll need to do more on either Friday or Tuesday. But I think, as we always do, that I will be able to show you some pretty impressive works of art by the young artists of room 19.

Homework: (1) Do Capitalization and Titles worksheet. (2) Do Following Directions worksheet. (3) Do the chapter reviews, pages 334-335 in Math. (4) Finish the second rough draft of the place to love paper.

Students were also given three pages of study questions for their history packet. This is due on Tuesday. Even I am not villainous enough to give that much homework in one night. At least I am not that villainous yet….. Ha ha ha!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course you aren't foolish enough to give hammers and chisels to NINE year olds. But, what about the TEN year olds? (Like MANY kids in the class, including me.)

John D Bassett said...

For you ten year olds, we'll be carving tree trunks with chain saws.

Anonymous said...

LOL. Wait... you don't have the budget for stones of marble, hammers, and chisels, but you can get chain saws? Oh well, I like the idea. Maybe next Thursday. That would be perfectly ordinary... right?