Buggy!

Another fantastic day in room 19. We started in Independent Work Time doing some review of regular and irregular verbs. The students also took their post-it notes from the “Sarah, Plain and Tall” story and created a T-chart from them. These notes indicated the personal connections the students made while reading the story and the specific points in the text which prompted those thoughts and memories.

We did art early in the day to avoid the heat. I split the students into two group. While one group played various recess games, the other group walked around and tried to sketch them playing. The groups then switched and the players became the artists. When the students returned to the room, they took these sketches and turned them into line drawings using markers. Some were quite good!

After lunch, we   practiced our “Marco Polo” body percussion routines. I’ll be putting a couple of them on the blog as video next week. Then, it was bug time! Our second investigation in the FOSS program deals with isopods and darkling beetles. Today, the students started the investigation first by looking at the bugs. This created, as you can imagine, a certain amount of squealing “Ooh, I don’t want to touch it. You touch it.” But they were really interested.

After examining the isopods and the beetles by eye and with a hand lens, the students made runways for these animals. They will be doing a variety of experiments to see how these little animals respond to changes in their environment. Making the runways required the the groups follow a sequential set of directions, but I am pleased to say that all of them succeeded.

Homework:  (1) Do the “Sarah Plain and Tall” crossword and the “Silly Sentences” on the back. (2) Do the “Natural Resources” study sheet. Students will need to bring home their California book for this. (3) Do “Subtracting Across Zeros,” Envision Math, pages 42-43 and the “Transportation Solutions” on the back of the answer sheet. (4) Study for the spelling test. A word search has been provided if this will help, but it is optional. The best help is for someone to quiz students on the words. All the words are in the box at the bottom of the word search.