Again, Happy New Year!

A heartfelt Happy New Year to those of you who celebrate the Asian Lunar New Year’s Holiday. The students from our neighboring Korean Dual Language Program classroom looked spiffy in their traditional Hanbok attire. I wish I had planned ahead a little more and had planned a little something for us for this holiday. Somehow it always just sneaks up on me….

Nevertheless, it was a pleasant and productive day, as usual, in room 19. We started off today with Independent Work Time. We had not been doing our Reading Logs recently because we had not had an opportunity to check out books from the library since early December. But now that we are back on our regular schedule there, we will be reading and responding just about every day again. This is such an important activity to improve their reading skills. I also really missed reading their journals each week.

We started a new story in the Mystery to Medicine unit. This one is called “The Bridge Dancers.” It’s not my favorite story – it seems little contrived to me – but it is in the anthology to emphasize that there are medical practices which rely on herbs and other natural ingredients instead of modern chemicals to heal. We read through the story and discussed it as we read. Students have some follow us work here tonight.

After recess we became a little artistic. We took our study guides and other papers from the second unit of California history and bound these into booklets. The students made covers for these books and some were pretty nice.

We also made some pictures to go along with the essays they wrote about President Obama’s inaugural. Again, there was some really nice work here. These will be for a bulletin board. I may have some students touch up some promising work tomorrow. Here are a few nice ones:

All this took a little longer than I expected, and we ended up using some of our time after lunch to complete these. We went out to PE around 1:00 pm, and we did softball again after completing our exercises. Coming back to the classroom, we checked, corrected, and discussed the math work for this weekend. Students will have a test over chapter 15, but we will not take this until Wednesday afternoon.

Homework:  (1) Do the Using Reading Strategies worksheet. Be sure to not only paste in the post-it notes, but also note the specific areas in the text which prompted the prediction, connection, or question. (2) Make a tree map to sort the spelling words. (3) Do the study questions on the “Bridge Dancers” questions. (4) Do “Review Test,” Math, page 290 and “Cumulative Review,” Math, page 291.