A New Year

Welcome back! Happy New Year to everybody!

First, let me thank all the families for their extraordinary generosity at Christmas. I was touched by the kind words in the card and I must say that the cash inside came inside very handy during the holidays! There were a number of other gifts which I received as well, and if I were the person my mother wanted me to be I would have already responded with my thank you notes.

We had a good first day back. We spent the first few minutes getting reacquainted, and then the students started writing about their breaks. I gave them the option of writing a personal vignette (nonfiction) or a story (fiction). We shared rough drafts. On Wednesday, the students will work on revising these and doing second drafts.

We will be reading “Birth of a Baby Food” next in Open Court, and last year one of my parents led the class in creating baby food commercials as part of this unit. I loved the lesson, and I still had the baby food jars left over so the students had a chance to do it this year. We talked about the classic advertising and propaganda techniques – appeal to authority, bandwagon, glittering generalities, and so forth – and the students used these as they improvised their ads. We filmed them as you can see below.

After recess, we read some more of Island of the Blue Dolphins. We talked about the rancho period in Southern California and read the accompanying chapter in the book.

We are going to be working on Charlie Brown in earnest now. The Farrington family kindly agreed to photocopy the scripts for us, and while we are waiting for these to arrive we’ll be reviewing the video and a prior student production from another school. We’ll be doing casting soon, and I’ll be begging for parent help…. Before we started to watch the video, though, we did a theater exercises as a kind of refresher.

We did PE today with room 37 as well as room 19. It’s a fewer more logistics with a third class, but it makes it easier also to have a third teacher working with an activity. Math was about factoring – not a particularly hard concept for the students.

Homework: (1) Write the spelling words in syllables. (2) Do the “Word Knowledge” and “Vocabulary from Context” papers in preparation for reading the story tomorrow. (3) Do the rancho study questions and the worksheet on historical maps. (4) Do “Factors,” envision Math pages 178-179 and the “Division Amazement” on the back.