Symbols

Today we were artistic.

After reviewing the “Birth of a Baby Food” story, we talked about cause and effect. We then used one of our Thinking Maps, the Multi-Flow Map, to illustrate the factors which led to the development of Gerber baby food and the impact that this product had on the Gerber family and the larger society in the 1920’s. The example below had particularly fun illustrations.

After recess, we talked more about the rancho period in California history.  We discussed the hide and tallow trade, and the students pretended to envy the Californio children who only had a few weeks of school at the most each year.

After lunch, we had another read through of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. There’s a lot of talent in room 19, and it’s going to be hard to pick just two people for each of these parts.

Thursday is our regular visual arts day. Our lesson today dealt with complementary colors, that is, those that are opposite each other on the color wheel. The suggested activity for this in the art curriculum was to have the students pick several symbols which said something about the school, and to use complementary colors for each symbol. I added a little to this assignment because I also had the students write a paragraph explaining their choices. Here is a good example:

     Today in Art we made symbols. The first symbol I made was an eraser. In school, you need erasers because you make mistakes. My second symbol was scissors. You need scissors in Art. Finally, my third, and final, symbol was the flag. You need a flag in school to say the pledge of allegiance.

We finished by taking a math test . We’ll correct it tomorrow and I will post the grades as soon as possible.

Homework:  (1) Do one spelling sentence for each spelling word. (2) Do the “Conjunctions” and “Compound Fractures” worksheets. (3) Do the “Life in Mexican California” study sheet and the accompanying “Rancho San Miguel” map reading exercise. (4) Do the “Dividing Money” worksheet.