A Special Place

Today we concentrated on our writing.

We had a special visitor today from the fifth grade. Miss Limb, our fifth grade KDLP teacher, is working on her administrative credential. As part of her coursework, she has to videotape some classes and write about them. She asked me if I would be willing to help her out. I said “Yes”, of course. I offered the students a special incentive if they helped make it a perfect video for her, and they came through magnificently.

We concentrated on descriptive writing. I asked the students to each think of their favorite place, their special place. I played part of  Tobias Pickers’s “Old and Lost Rivers” while they let pictures of that special place and memories of it drift through their brains. We shared some of these with our partners.  I shared fantastic picture book called All the Places to Love by Patricia McLaughlin. We talked about the book and the characters and the special places for those characters. I then shared a composition I had written about my special place, my grandmother’s house in the Berkshire Mountains.

The students were then challenged to write their own compositions about their own special places. They did Thinking Maps before writing, and they finished rough drafts before recess. After recess, they worked again with a partner to revise and edit the composition, and then they worked on final drafts and a picture to go with that draft. A number of students will be completing this as part of their homework tonight, while others are completely done here. These will be typed and scanned and posted as part of their first ThinkQuest project.

Thursdays is our usual art day, and today we talked about both shape and rhythm in art. Students are always surprise to hear the word rhythm in relationship to art, but they quickly grasp the concept of creating unity by repeating shapes. This is a great example of this using a series of similar shapes.

The assignment in the art book asked them to particularly focus on creating flowing rhythm by using wavy lines and organic shapes. This was a particularly great example of that. 

I promised the students as little homework as possible today in thanks for their cooperation with Miss Limb’s project, and so we spent the last 30 minutes or so doing the math. So it should be a pretty free night tonight. Enjoy!

Homework:  (1) Study the spelling words. (2) Do “Using an Expanded Algorithm” and “Mixed Problem Solving”, Envision Math, pages  96-99.

Some students will be putting finishing touches on their final drafts and the pictures as well.