What a Great Day!

We had an excellent first day of school. It looks like it may be my best year...EVER!

We began with having the students fill out an interest inventory and a reading pretest. The inventory helps me get to know them better, which also helps me to know what books they might enjoy reading and what subjects they might like to write about. The pretest gives me a rough idea of what skills needs a little brush-up.

We did our opening activities after that. These include the Pledge of Allegiance, Today in History, and counting school days in bases 5, 10, and 12. We will add current events to this soon. I then went over the basic class rules, and introduced some key procedures and policies. There are not many big rules in school, but there are a lot of special procedures to learn for the many different activities. I expect we will be working on this for most of the month; I do not expect perfection here right away!

Then we moved on to Language Arts. Today we mixed speaking and writing. Students interviewed each other and then wrote a paragraph beginning "I'd like to introduce..." about their partner. They learned some interesting facts about each other! This took us up to recess.

After recess, we learned to make simple portraits. The students again worked with the same partner as before. They drew the portrait first in pencil, and then went over it in oil pastels. You can see a few of the outstanding results above. This took a bit longer than expected, so we continued work on it after lunch.

Around one o'clock, we went to Physical Education. For the past several years, room 19 has done PE with the third graders in room 17. Mrs. Caruso, the teacher in room 17, and I went over squad order and warmup exercises with the students.

Returning from PE, we did a math pretest. This one is significantly harder than the reading pretest, and I expect the students to get a number wrong here. I am mostly interested in the things they get correct because these indicate fourth grade skills which were already mastered in third grade. The test allows me to know what parts of the curriculum I do NOT need to intensely teach. That's a big help because there are soooo many topics to cover.

Homework: (1) Complete the final draft of the "I'd Like to Introduce" paragraph. Corrected rough drafts have been returned to the students. Do the final draft in cursive if possible on good paper. Staple the final draft, the rough draft, and the interview paper together. (2) In the Math book, read page 2 about "Benchmark Numbers" and do page 3. Also, read page 4 about "Place Value" and do page 5. We did not discuss these much in class because they are review from third grade. (3) Do "What I Already Know" about California.