Monday, February 08, 2010

Digging Out

It was a pretty great day here in room 19. We started off with a journal assignment about where and when you would go if there were such things as time machines. We had some really creative and interesting answers to that question.

After that, the students started work on advertisements for prescription drugs. As you recall, our new unit in Open Court Reading is called “Mystery to Medicine” and it explores the nature of medicine and helps students to think about careers in the health sciences field. So each year I always talk about drug advertisements – it’s sad how familiar students are with this genre – and I invite them to create their own medicine and market it. I’ll show some examples of their work tomorrow, but I promise you there will be some quite creative and sometimes funny stuff.

Today we started work on our new, native-plant garden, thanks to the hard work of Alysoun Higgins. She led a small army of student volunteers who dug up some of the old plants. They had a great time!

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We also started watching the 1936 version of Ramona,  the Helen Hunt Jackson story which did so much to romanticize the Spanish and Mexican colonial periods in California history. The plot is pretty corny, but the film gives a remarkably good view of what it was like to live on a rancho in Southern California in that era. We will be watching the movie in 20-25 minute increments during the week, and I have multiple-choice questions for the students to answer as they watch the movie. This keeps them really focused on the story.

ramona1936 After lunch, we did physical education. We started a new color grouping system to integrate the students from the three classes, and it was overall quite successful. After PE, we took a look at equivalent fractions in math.

Homework:  (1) Do the apostrophes worksheet. (2) Do the Word Knowledge and Vocabulary from Context for the “Sewed Up his Heart” story. (3) Do the division worksheet. (4) Do the Factors and Algebra worksheets. (5) Do “Equivalent Fractions,” envision Math pages 231-232.

Some students will also need to finish their prescription drug advertisement.

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