After Oscar

We did some catching up this morning about our weekends, as we often do on Mondays, and I was quite surprised by how many of the students had watched the Academy Awards last night. They could remember who won what, and some even had strong opinions about whether awards were deserved or not. So, today was room 19’s post Oscar party. Well, party of sorts. We did mostly serious things. But we did end the day on a fun note.

We worked a bit this morning on the kinds of reading skills that will come up on the testing in May. I am not a big believer in test prep, but many of our students are not good test takers and their scores from last year do not represent their best abilities. So we would like to help them to show how smart they really are. This is helpful in the race for a good junior high school spot as all the parent know. We also took the spelling test, and the results were wonderful. That is already on the gradebook.

After recess, I read a bit of By the Great Horn Spoon! and we talked about the first California constitutional convention. If you are in Monterey, be sure to stop by Colton Hall where the original desks – many with quill pens – are still on display from this historic event. After lunch, we turned our attention in math to changing fractions and mixed numbers into decimals and placing them on the number line.

We did PE, as usual, with rooms 19 and 37. I was not sure at first how mixing the grade levels would work, but it had been a big success. In fact, the second and third graders are beating our fourth graders at the soccer skills game!

After PE, we paining our bas reliefs that we did Friday. The results here were really good as you can see. I put this last so that students who finished early could have the opportunity to get a head start on homework.

Homework:  (1) Do spelling sentences. (2) Do “31st State” study guide. (3) Do “Mixed Number and Fractions on a Number Line,” envision Math, page 282-283. (4) Do the fractions to decimals worksheet.