The Real First Day

By the third day of school we start to get into a routine. The novelty of the first day or two is over, and it is time to start the regular sequence of lessons which will define the rest of the year. This is the real start of school.

We began by tying up some loose ends from the previous days. The students did final drafts of two compositions. Several also had to finish the art from the previous day – that was the lesson, you recall, interrupted by the endless fire alarm problems. We did a little more front loading for the Risks and Consequences unit. I gave the students pictures of people involved in a variety of activities from auditioning for American Idol to parachuting. For each, they worked with a partner to determine the potential positive and negative consequences for the activity.

We read a chapter – a rather boring one, but containing essential information – from the California History textbook. This covered stuff like hemisphere and continents and areas of the United States.

After lunch, we did some PE. We are not quite ready to begin the EPEC program yet – I’ll talk more about that on Tuesday – so the students did their exercises and then they rotated between a number of PE activity stations. We corrected Thursdays math homework, and by that time it was time for them to get Friday’s homework and to leave. It felt a bit rushed at the end, and I did not have the time I would normally have to go over the assignments and give them a few minutes to start.

Homework:  (1) Do pages 1-6 from the Open Court Reading handouts. These include a Circle Map, Word Knowledge, Vocabulary from Context, and a worksheet on vocabulary skills. (2) Do “Millions,” Envision Math, pages 8-9. (3) Do the study sheet for “Where is California?”. Note that the page numbers have been provided to make rereading the text easier and more productive.