Back from Break!

I hope everybody had a pretty good break. I am feeling much more refreshed after getting away. Of course, as the completely dedicated fourth grade teacher I am, I went around California for a few days so I could have some more experience for teaching social studies. And, Edie and Eli insisted on coming with me.

Here we are in Death Valley. I’m the one in the cloud of sand. The dogs were perplexed by this weird human behavior, but willing to go along with it.

And here we are at Owens Lake with the Sierra in the background. This was right before Edie decided to roll in this alkali  waste.

Then we went up to June Lake where the weather was decidedly less warm. I have never been crazy about snow – bad memories of a youth spent in the upper midwest – but Edie positively adored snow. Eli was no so sure about it.

So back to real life now. We had a good day as usual in room 19. We did Independent Reading as usual. We went over homework and did some preparation for reading the next story in the Open Court anthology. We did some free writing in Writer’s Workshop. More on that later this week.

We went over our history homework. I finally found my DVD of Charlie Brown explaining the Transcontinental Railroad, so we watched that. It’s a little lame, but a good review of the facts.

After lunch we did music. We worked on understanding binary form in music, and the students improvised “questions” and “answer” motifs. We went out to PE. We came back, corrected and discussed our math homework and went over a few key concepts for today’s homework.

Homework:  (1) Do the spelling jumble. The works this week all have “qu” in them. (2) Do the history chapter review. I was not completely happy with the way this was in the book, so I altered it slightly and made a handout for the students. (3) Do “Length on a Coordinate Grid,” Math, pages 465-457. (4) Do “Lines of Symmetry,” Math, pages 488-489.