Pretty Ordinary

Today was just an ordinary day. Nothing wrong with that: in fact, they're probably the most important for steady learning.

We worked today in grammar on the difference between complete and simple predicate. We read a story about The Arabian Nights that gave a little background to the "Ali Baba Bernstein" story. We looked more closely at the ideas trait in writing, and the students used the rubric to explain why one anonymous writing sample had poor ideas while another had good ideas. To make sure they were concentrating only on ideas, both of them had pretty poor spelling. They went to Mr. Pratt for Social Studies. We began exploring body percussion in music. This is using snapping, clapping, patsching and stomping as a way to use the human body as a percussion instrument. We had our usual mixing for art, music, and physical education. In math we are studying the difference between too much and too little information in solving word problems.

Homework:  (1) Do "Missing or Extra Information," pages 34-35 in the enVision Math book. (2) Do "Remembering Details" and "Sequencing Events" worksheet. The students will need their Island of the Blue Dolphins for this. (3) Do the "Subtraction with Regrouping 4" worksheet. The students will be tested on this skill tomorrow. (4) Do the "Ali Baba Spelling wordsearch. As usual, the spelling test will be tomorrow. (5) Do "Bird Houses" on the back of the math answer sheet.