Lunar New Year

Today we celebrated our of pan Asian heritage by composing Japanese poems, painting a Korean celadon vase, and doing it all on the Chinese New Year! As you can see in a couple examples below - it was not always easy to get a good photograph of a complete student work - the students wrote Haiku about a branch of a flowering white cherry tree I had brought in from my yard. They then sketched the bough and the Korean vase in pencil, went over the lines in sharpie, and used watercolor to finish. Some of their work was astoundingly good!

That took up a surprising amount of the day, and students who finished early - quite a number of them - had a chance to start homework. In math, we worked on mixed numbers and improper fractions. It's not that hard a concept, but it's a new one to the students and it took a bit of time for it to sink in. 

By the end of the day, they were tired, I was tired, and we pleasantly spent the last 30 minutes in free play on the yard. 

Homework:  (1) Do spelling words 16-20 as usual. The words are :  appetite, banister, canister, subscribe, and fisticuffs. (2) Do the "Making Inferences" worksheet. (3) Write the words to "Food, Glorious Food." This helps the children learn the words to the song and practice their handwriting! (4) Do pages 236-237 in the math book. (5) Do the Equivalent Fractions and Division Practice worksheets.