Monochromatic

Sorry for a couple of days without entries. As some of you know, the last 48 hours have been pretty tumultuous for me. Things are much calmer now, and I thank you for your many expressions of support.

We had a good day, as usual, today in in room 19. We started, again as usual, with journaling. The students were asked to tell about an embarrassing experience, either real or fictional. The entries were great, but the real-life ones were particularly well-written.

We then had our elections for class representatives. The students seeking office made speeches, and then all the students voted. I am please to announces that our class representatives will be Katie Higgins and Luca Arroyo, and that Caleb Gerber will serve as the alternate. Congratulations!

We finished reading the history of medicine selection in the Open Court book. I tried to supplement the dryness of the reading with a little of the blood and guts background that I know that fourth grade students love. We started on a flow map here, and we will be working some more on that tomorrow.

Yesterday we took the LAUSD Quarter 2 test. I was not happy that this test covered things which the students had not yet had a chance to study, so I had them write their answers also on a sheet of lined paper. We graded that test today, and all the items I deemed unfair became extra-credit. I’ve posted the results to the gradebook, and they were generally quite good. 

After lunch we practiced Charlie Brown a little more. We discussed fractions of a whole and fractions of a set. This is review, and none of the students seemed to have the slightest problem with these concepts. We then went on to Art. Today we were looking at the idea of monochromatic color schemes. We were again using tempera, and again we had some great pictures.

Homework:   (1) Please review the spelling words. (2) Do the “Using Reading Strategies” sheet – this is the one where students paste in their post-it notes. (3) Do the study guide for the Open Court story. There are a lot of questions here, but they are sequential and there are page numbers to guide the re-reading of the story. (4) Do “Regions and Sets,” envision Math pages 225-226. Not that page 227 is NOT assigned. (5) Do the “Factor Fiends” and “Subtraction Masters” worksheet.