Saturation

Sometimes we have to teach more than just language arts and math, science and history. There’s that “other side of the report card” that deals with social skills and work habits. So one of the things we worked on today was learning to organize our materials. The students sorted out and turned in the completed math units, and the fourth graders received special folders for Science and History. Fifth graders already have Science notebooks. It took a little longer than I’d have liked, but the desks no longer look so much like Florida trailer parks after the latest hurricane.

In Math today the fourth graded focused on the distributive property of multiplication while fifth graders learned about exponents. In fifth science today we explored the concept of saturation. The students took 50 mL of water and placed it in a small bottle. They added salt 5 cc at a time until the the salt would no longer dissolve. They took careful notes of this, and tomorrow they will be filtering and weighing the saline solutions. 

Fourth graders will be doing one of my favorite investigations of the year tomorrow - isopods and darkling beetles. They will be exploring the environmental preferences of the creatures, and to get ready for that activity they made “runways” today. This was also a remarkably good activity for learning to follow written directions. 

In music today - our classroom music, that is, - we studied body percussion. This is a standard technique in Orff Schulwerk for teaching rhythm. The children use their bodies as musical instruments with four major movements:  the snap,

the clap

the “patsch" or pat,

and the stomp.

The students practiced these to a jump rope rhyme, and then started adding body percussion to their food chants. They will be performing these for the other students in the class soon!

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words 16-20 in cursive and write a sentence for each word. (2) Do the spelling word search. (3) Do the Three Times One practice sheet. (4) Fourth grade math:  Do pages 65-67 plus “Moonbeam Multiplication” Fifth grade math:  Do pages 66-67 plus “Writing Large Numbers” (5) Fourth grade history:  Do Natural Resources study sheet.