Appreciated!

First of all, let me say that I feel appreciated! Today was the first day of Teacher Appreciation Week and the students sent me a nice card along with a lovely plant.

We started off, as usual, with our Independent Reading. This is going really well now and it is a delight to read their journals each week. We then did what’s called “frontloading” in education-talk. Frontloading is giving the students an assignment which will help them to relate better to something that they are going to read or study later. In this case, I front loaded a selection the students will read tomorrow from Pearl S. Buck’s The Big Wave. This is a tale of a tsunami which destroyed a small town in Japan and a young boy’s entire family. I had the students write an email to a friend whose family was killed in a massive earthquake in Northern California. The did a really good job with this.

After recess, we began reviewing Chapter 8 of the history book in preparation for a test either tomorrow or Wednesday. We continued this for a bit after lunch while I got ready for physical education. In PE, I began working with the students on underhanded pitching. In math, we are skipping a couple chapters so that we can go over equations and formulae before testing next week.

We also corrected our Topic 15 math test and the double-digit division quiz. The scores are on the gradebook. These results were a bit disappointing, and the students will have another chance at Topic 15 in a week or so. They should use the Practice and Reteach pages in the workbook to review this before the next math test.

Homework:  (1) Do Concept card based on one of the stories read so far. Many students completed this in class this morning. (2) Do spelling sentences for words 1-10. (3) Do Word Knowledge and Vocabulary from Context for “The Big Wave.” (4) Do the review questions for chapter 8 in the history book. (5) Do “Equations and Formulas” on pages 418-419 in the math book. (6) Do the Algebra and Fractions review worksheets. Again, this is to help the students get ready for testing next week.

I hope that many of you had a chance to see the California Dance Institute show on Friday. Our room 19 students were fantastic. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my camera (which never does very well without flash in the auditorium anyhow) so I do not have any picture to post of this. Should anybody have so good pictures of the performance, please email them to me so we can share some visuals.