Ramona

This is one of the slowest weeks in the school year. The students are wild with the expectation of Winter Break, and the teachers are far more excited than the students. Sigh. We’ll get through.

It was a fairly productive day despite everything. We started work on another Treasures story and we corrected some work from last week. We learned about multiplying fractions by whole numbers and we also talked about placing fractions and decimals on a number line. For some strange reason that last skill, which never comes up in real life, is an obsession of the standards folks.

Our most interesting part of the day was starting to watch the classic movie version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, Ramona. Starring Loretta Young and the almost-intolerable Don Ameche, it does give the students not only a potent dose of the “Mission Myth,” the idea that Mexican California was a kind of paradise, but it also provides a good sense of what life was like on a working rancho.

Homework:  (1) Do spelling words 1-5 as usual. (2) Do the spelling word search. (3) Do the chart on page 371 in the Treasures book. (4) Do pages 180, 181, and 182 of the Practice book. (5) Do the Rancho San Miguel map exercise. (6) Do Fractions and Whole Numbers 1. (7) Do pages 279-280 in the math book.