Monday, September 26, 2011

Bugs

What a whirlwind of a day! We had a great day in room 19, but I felt like I never had a chance to stop and catch my breath!

We began by reviewing simple subject and complete subject. All of this will help us to understand compound sentences. One of our major writing goals in fourth grade is get the students away from writing only simple sentences "The cat chased the dog" to more complex ones with subordinate clauses like "Eager for revenge, the cat chased the dog."  We started learning the vocabulary for this week's Treasures story, "Kid Reporters." We also evaluated a couple more anonymous stories for how well they score on the Ideas rubric.

Science was super fun today. In fact, it was so fun I didn't have time to even take a picture of them working. The students made "runways" today which they will use tomorrow for our work with darkling beetles and isopods. These runways look something like old-fashioned pencil boxes though they are made out of cardboard and aluminum foil. The students had a little time today to get some observations of the insects. Here is a stock image of a darkling beetle.


And here is another Google Image picture of an isopod. These are often called "pill bugs" or "roly polies" because they roll into a ball.


Tomorrow I will hopefully get pictures of our students with our bugs. After lunch, we read another chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins and we also worked some more on body percussion. At Mixing, I worked with the students on doing hurdles on the track. These are really cones, not the long bars you see at the Olympics, but the students took them just as seriously.

Homework:  (1) Do “Subtracting Whole Numbers,” pages 40-41 in the math book.  This is straightforward subtraction, nothing strange today! They will need scratch paper. (2) Read “Isopods and Beetles,” pages 93-97 in the Science Resources book and answer the questions. (3) Do the spelling jumble for the “Kid Reporters” spelling list. (4) For “extra credit,” do “So Many Decisions” on the back of the math answer sheet.

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