Imaginary Creatures

We start out the day most days with journals, and the assigned topic this morning was to suppose the student had an unusual animal – real or imaginary. The students were asked to describe how they would train this animal to make it into a good pet. The results were often hilarious. Here is one example.

Hi. My name is Lucas and I have brought by pet. I call him a Spitosaurus. It has a dog’s body, a dragon’s wings, and a cat’s tail. It can move very fast. It can also breathe fire. It is very hard to train. You must first put him or her in a big cage (it is very huge). Then you have to give him food. It will start to like you then. Start to train him just like a dog because most of his brain is dog. He is called a Spitosaurus because he spits on people if he feels threatened. But his spit is acid. There are not many left in the wild, but if you want to find one in the wild you would have to go out to your back yard. You have to train him a lot for him to like you. There are only 100 left in the world. Spitosauruses like to eat Taco Bell. Nobody knows why. So I have to go to Taco Bell every day and order lots of Doritos Locos tacos. I think that explains why there isn’t any food for more customers in the line behind me in the morning. OK. That is my Spitosaurus. Oh, no! My Spitosaurus just escaped!!!!

We also began writing tall tales today inspired by our reading of Pecos Bill yesterday. We’ll be revising and editing them tomorrow.

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words 16-20 ten times each in cursive and a sentence for each. (2) Do “Plural Possessives,” pages 116-117 and “Verbs,” page 118 in the Practice book. (3) Do Longer Long Division 4. (4) Do “Simplest Form” pages 234-235 in the math book.

Students also need to write about a page about the person they chose for their report. This should be written in the first person. “I read the book Marie Curie by Mike Venezia. I learned a lot of things I did not know about her…..”

A few students may even need to finish their rough drafts although they were given 75 minutes of class time to work on this.