Fun and … Learning

We had a pretty good time today! And yet, we still learned a lot of stuff….

We started quietly enough with some more cursive review. We did the usual introductory stuff, taking a little more time than usual to discuss Today in History because today is Citizenship Day, marking the adoption of the federal Constitution by all thirteen original states. We talked a bit about cause and effect, the reading skill highlighted for the first Open Court story, and we created a quick Multi-Flow Map to review the story. We also used pantomime to review our vocabulary.

We then moved on to art. Our lesson this week was on gesture drawing. We discussed a couple examples of this, and talked about the techniques artists use for gesture drawing. The students then split into small, self-selected group. In each group, one person posed while the other quickly sketched.

After they had sketched each others in a variety of different poses, they used crayon to color in the figures. They then went over this with a watercolor wash.

 

They had a good, fun, sometimes noisy time doing this. After recess, we did a gallery walk so they could exchange positive compliments on each others’ work using the language of the discipline of art. They also reflected on what their work and the activity in their Arts journal.

After lunch, we did Science. Our lesson today was building a terrarium. We split into teacher-selected groups, and passed out the necessary stuff. Something always goes wrong the first time you do a Science activity, and this time the plastic terrarium bases were stuck together. It seemed to take forever for me to pry them apart, but the students were patient and we managed to get all the stuff distributed. Students made a map of where in the terrarium they wanted to plant each kind of seed. They had barley, peas, corn, radish, and clover.

The day ended with cleaning up and rearranging the desks. We will be monitoring the growth in our terrariums over the next two weeks.

Homework:  (1) Complete the next three pages in the Open Court handout package – cause and effect, the crossword puzzle, and the study questions. (2) Do the Science handout questions. Be sure to use complete sentences. (3) Do “Test Prep,” Math, pp 18-19. Students are supposed to do these twelve multiple choice questions on the back of yesterday’s homework. (4) If time – and I make it clear that if they were going to miss any homework assignment it should be this one – try to spelling word search.