Hands On

Sorry for the late post, but the network went down almost as soon as the bell rang, and I had to finish this at home.

What a great day! It start out quietly, but after recess it built to a wonderful bang!

We began by doing final drafts of a couple compositions which students had done with their thinking maps last year. They finished the "All About Me" and "My Character" sections of the Thinking Maps autobiography project. By the end of the month all eight sections of this project should be written and revised and the students will make it into their first book of the year. As we usually do on Mondays, we shared stories about the fun things we did on our weekend. The students generally had more fun than I did! They're lucky to have such great parents and friends.

We then turned our attention to Open Court. Most of the students had brought pictures of somewhat risky activities, and then shared the risks and benefits of the activity with the class. I suppose when they have to do their first cost-benefit analysis in Economics they'll say, "Hmmm. Didn't we do that already in Fourth Grade?" We then went on to discuss and practice Predicting as a reading strategy. Research shows that good readers approach the text in different ways from poor readers, even when both can sound out the words equally well. We will be explicitly discussing and practicing these strategies. Today we discussed the role of making and checking predictions when the children read. We practice this using the first part of a wonderful picture book by Chris van Allsburg called Produtiti! I typed up the first five or six pages and left a column for the students to write their predictions and other comments as we went through the text slowly. They were a little confused at first about what we were doing, but they quickly got the hang of it. They made some pretty good predictions with a story that takes some odd twists.

Then the fun really began! We did our first science experiment today. "Hands on" science, as they like to call it these days, is fun, enriching, and absolutely exhausting at times. It's particularly like that when we're working with bugs! Today's experiment dealt with mealworms. We placed a small cup of bran meal, a cup filled with 20 corn flakes, and a small cup of water. We placed about 6 - 8 giant mealworms in each shoe box. After lunch, we came back to see what the mealworms are doing, and we will check on them again after lunch tomorrow. All of this is to see how organisms need, and meet their need for, food, water, air, and shelter.

We went off to PE where students did warmups, two laps, and rotations among three various sports/fitness stations. After that, we finished off by checking over the math pretest we took on Tuesday. They did surprisingly quite well on it!

Home Studies: Work on the two pages of Science questions and skills in the green Science folder.

I hope as many of you as possible will be able to come to our Back to School Activity tomorrow at 5:00 pm. You can bring small children with you in class, and a fully-credentialed LAUSD teacher will be available to supervise older children on the yard.