Looking at Ourselves

Our day started in the usual quiet way, but we had a visit from a company of actors from room 7 who performed their version of "The King's Fountain" for us. They were great! In the picture below, the poor man tells the two blacksmiths about the King's plot to divert all the water and cause everyone to die of thirst.

We then finished reading the story in the Open Court reader, and the students continued the "Asking Questions" strategy. The students then took the post-it notes on which they had been recording their questions and they created a T chart with the textual references on one side of the page and the questions on the other side.

The students worked with Mr Pratt, concluding their look at California geography. Meanwhile, I worked with his class on the bugs and learning to reading rhythm using the Kodaly rhythm syllables.

After lunch, we briefly looked at math. This is, I think, a pretty easy topic because our students seem to have their times tables generally quite well mastered. After that, we started art. Our topic today was lines and watercolor. The students experimented making different kinds of lines - thick, thin, light, dark, straight, curved, and zigzag - on a sheet of practice paper.

After that, I gave the students photographs of themselves. They used the photo to briefly sketch themselves on paper on a piece of regular paper, and then - and this was the hard part - they painted themselves in water color without already using pencil lines. This is not easy even for many professional artists, but some of our students did quite well with it!

Homework:  (1) Do the spelling wordsearch. The students already have the words from previous assignments. (2) Do "King's Fountain" study guide. (3) Do "Relating Multiplication and Division," envision Math, pages 74-75 and "Just the Fact(ors)" on the back.