No Slackers!

We’re working hard on these last days before vacation. There may be students who are just goofing off this week, but nobody in room 19 is!

We have been hard at work in the Tech Center for the last few days, and we’re closing in on getting finished on our HyperStudio project. A couple students, in fact, finished today and I’m pretty impressed with the work they’ve done. We will be in there for our last session tomorrow.

We also finished off a chapter in the Science book and students were given the end of lesson questions as a review. We actually discussed the answers to these in class, so this is mostly an exercise in writing complete sentences. Our guideline here is that the sentence should make sense even without seeing the question. Please check over the answers to see if this really is the case! We we’re having some problems here.

In math we’re finishing up the introduction to the customary measurement system. Students should be able to solve the problems with a table of measurements like the one on page 430 of the math book. They need not actually memorize the equivalences at this time.

The Holiday Party will be tomorrow from 12:00 to 1:00. If you are bringing food or supplies, please be here by about 11:30 to help set up. That way we can get started and cleaned up before our 1:00 p.m. fire drill!

Homework: (1) Study spelling. (2) Do “Ways to Change Units,” Math, page 431, 1-8. (3) Do "Rules for Changing Units," Math, p 433, 2-10 (4) Do "Use a Graph," Math, p 435, 1-9. (5) Write the answers to the questions in the Science book on page B 23 in complete sentences.

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Some photos of yesterday's trip to Placerita Canyon. Thanks to Robert's dad for taking so many fantastic pictures!
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Coming Right Along

Working on this HyperStudio project has really given a focus to our final week of school. We spent the morning in the Tech Center working on it. Several of the students are working on their final editing; others are making great progress towards finishing all five paragraphs and pictures. Only a handful of children are really lagging here.

After recess we continued studying measurement, completing our survey of customary – the traditional Anglo-American – measurement. We will be taking up the metric system in  the new year.

The three math assignments below may seem like a lot, but there are not all that many problems in each page. We are aiming at familiarity with the units here, knowing which ones are larger and which are smaller, which measure weight and which measure distance, rather than memorizing formulae for switching measures. That is important, of course, but will come later.

I sent home today a letter about the holiday party on Friday. Please send the tear-off back tomorrow so we can let David’s mom know how much to buy.

Homework: (1) Study Spelling. (2) Do "Yards and Miles," Math, pp 424-425, numbers 1-16. (3) Do "Capacity," Math, p 427, numbers 1-9. (4) Do "Weight," Math, p 429, numbers 1-10.    

Steady Progress

We made some progress today towards getting the City Wildlife completed. Most students are done with their Open Court test. The scores will be posted on the Gradebook shortly. We also got into the Tech Center and did more work on the HyperStudio stacks. Several students are finished with these “second drafts” and are now ready for final revisions and editing. With luck, everybody will be done by tomorrow.

Remember that our field trip to Placerita Canyon is Wednesday.  All permission slips are already done. I think we have enough parent volunteers. Also, our party is Friday. I’ll send home a message tomorrow about that. You can bring your own contribution or send something to Susan Moon.

Homework:  (1) Study spelling. (2) Measurement, Math, pages 421-423, numbers 1-38. (3) Do the Multiplication practice sheet.

Quick Post

We slogged on through the Open Court test today. With luck it should be finished by Friday. We discussed quadrilaterals at length, and geometry review is the major item on tonight’s homework. We also stopped by the book fair for a visit.

Homework:  (1) Study spelling. Test tomorrow. (2) Review/Test, Math, page 410 and Cumulative Review, Math, page 411.

Quadrilaterals and Such Things

We started the unit 2 Open Court test today. I hope we can finish the whole thing by the end of the week. It is a fairly tough test – particularly the reading comprehension – but I think it is still pretty fair. Results should be available on the Gradebook by Monday.

We also studied the different types of quadrilaterals today. The homework tonight is a little tricky here because there are often multiple right answers:  for example, a figure may be a parallelogram, a quadrilateral, and a rectangle. They need to think about these things carefully. It’s a lot tougher stuff than anything I ever studied in third grade.

Conferences seem to be coming along well. If I haven’t seen you yet, I look forward to it!

Homework:  (1) Study spelling. (2) Do the Skill Review worksheet on adjectives. Do all work on a separate sheet of paper – do not write on the photocopy. Answers only. (3) Do “Sort Quadrilaterals,” Math, pages 405-407, numbers 1-36.

In Brief

Just a short post today. We spent time today doing a good bit of review -- reviewing homework, reviewing vocabulary words, reviewing some of the basics of plane geometry. New things today included discussing quadrilaterals -- which will get quite complex tomorrow -- and the phases of the moon.

Conferences resume tomorrow. So far I think they have been quite productive.

Homework: (1) Study spelling. (2) Do crossword puzzle. We reviewed the words this morning. (3) Do Quadrilaterals, Math, pages 402-403, numbers 1-12. We started this one together in class. (4) Do Questions 1-4 on page B 15 of the Science book.

Conference Week

Conference week is, as Brian put it this morning, “rushy.” There’s so much to squeeze into such a short day. Today we started on our final story in the City Wildlife unit. It’s an odd little tale called “Sunflowers for Tina” about a young girl living in some grim part of New York City who dreams of having a garden. We also worked a little more on our five compositions for the City Wildlife HyperStudio stack. We’re going to try to get this one finished by Winter Break!

After recess, we had a brief assembly in the auditorium to hear the orchestra play. We went straight to lunch, and then we returned to the classroom to do some quick math. We are studying the different types of triangle right now. We’ll start on the different types of quadrilaterals soon.

Homework:  (1) Spelling. (2) Triangles, Math, pp. 399-401, numbers 1-21.

We saw a cool new sea lion exhibit just as we came into the zoo today.
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Some reindeer who were visiting the zoo just for the season.
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The flamingos seemed to come out to just to great us!
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Zoo Day

We had a damp, but pleasant time at the zoo today. It was nearly deserted - which was great - and a lot of the animals were out and particularly active - which was even better! Our only disappointment was that the bird show was cancelled because of the weather.

Homework: Treasure memories of the trip!