Shrimp

Today went pretty smoothly. I admit I was not happy after learning about the approval of the shortened school year, but we will make the best of it. I shudder when I think about the hundreds of dollars that will be missing from each of my next three checks.

We started off with Independent Reading. It’s a chore reading and responding to all the journals, but I am really impressed by the growth I see in reading comprehension and the use of reading strategies. We then went on to our next Open Court Reading story:  “Arctic Explorer:  The Story of Matthew Henson.” This is not a real thriller, but it does have some icky details in it that fourth graders like. We will take a couple days to finish it.

After recess, we did another Science experiment. This one, like the last couple we did, deals with tolerance, specifically saline tolerance. But here we are using brine shrimp rather than plants to check for response to salt levels. The students were fascinated by the tiny brine shrimp eggs.

We are doing Physical Education with Mrs. Caruso’s and Mr. Pratt’s class. This is going really, really well, and I really appreciate the generosity of the parents which has made it possible for us to have such great equipment. One of our rotation areas has been hitting, and the students have been practicing their swings with tees. This has been a lot of fun!

We concluded by looking at negative numbers in math, specifically comparing and ordering positive and negative integers. The students seem to get this without much problem.

Homework:  (1) Sort the spelling words into two tree maps. One tree map should focus on prefixes, the other on plurals. Since all the plurals end in –es, focus on the letters before this.  (2) Do the “Adventure Tale” worksheet. (3) Do the Double Digit Divisors worksheet. We went over this in class and they had some time to get started. This is a new skill, and they will be working on it all week. (4) Do “Comparing Integers,” envision Math pages 338-339. The enrichment page on the back is a little tricky, but figuring out the missing numbers on the table should be fun.