Great Day

I went to see Boris Godunov last night at the Hollywood Bowl. The soloists from the Kirov Opera were fantastic, and the orchestra sounded great from my friends' box seats. Unfortunately, I didn't get home until after midnight, and I was not looking forward to teaching on only five hours of sleep....

But the kids were super and we had a great day. We began the day correcting yesterday's math work. We went on to discuss the Circle Map, the graphic design used in the Thinking Map program to model describing. I find the Circle Map unnecessarily restrictive, since only adjectives can be used in all but one of the circles. But the students did quite well dealing with this rule, and they went on to write some good paragraphs about their personal characteristics. Monday and Tuesday we will do final drafts of the two compositions done so far, and then on Wednesday continue with the Double Bubble Map (which has nothing to do with chewing gum).

After that, we looked at the first page of the Open Court packet and discussed what "risks" and "consequences" were. It was a good discussion. The students then went on to create entries for our Concept/Question board. If you are not familiar with this feature of the Open Court program, I'll show a picture of it next week on the blog when it is more complete. It is a tool for creating communal knowledge about our theme as we go from selection to selection in the book.

After recess, we did an art project exploring geometric shapes and the color wheel. Students made a number of large, overlapping geometric shapes, and assigned a color to each. In areas where the colors overlapped, new colors were created. They continued this project after lunch. As we have previously done during music time, the students took time to reflect on the project in the Arts journals after they finished. When everybody was done we did a "gallery walk." This is a technique for positive self and peer evaluation. The students walked silently around the room and looked at everybody's work. I then asked who they thought done done a good job and why. It's a very supportive kind of critique which really helps the children grow as artists.

We went out to PE. Thankfully, the heat has subsided a little, and our exercise and laps were done fairly easily. After that, the children were able to choose sports/play areas for the remainder of the period. We came back from PE and watched a fun Bill Nye video about insects. Next week we will be doing an experiment with mealworms -- that's what the shoe boxes are for -- and we will be studying the topic of adaption in the textbook. The film helped give us some ideas to think about in preparation for this.

Home Studies: Light tonight -- the teacher has a lot of grading to do and needs a break already! Just bring in a picture from a magazine of something risky. This could be a good risk, like fire fighters entering a burning building, or a bad risk like doing drugs. Try to "think outside the box" here and come up with something original.