3 D

Welcome back! We started today by sharing our Spring Break experiences. Some of our students had a perfectly fabulous time. I’m deeply jealous of one trip to a resort in Mexico. Other students stayed home but still mostly enjoyed a few days off. For those of us who did not have the perfect spring breaks, we started by describing the one we wish we’d had in our journals. We shared these with each other and the class. After that, we read and discussed “The Rouge Out-Rogued,” chapter 10 of By the Great Horn Spoon! It was a fun chapter. 

After recess, we read about the growth of agriculture in the years after the advent of the transcontinental railroad and the creation by the dastardly Big Four of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Students were outraged by their treatment of the farmers at Mussel Slough. 

We are going to be starting a look at volume soon in math, so I wanted them to start looking at the world three dimensionally. So we did an art activity to help them do that. The students had to pick any object in the room and look at it from different angles. This student picked the clock and had fun trying to see it from the bottom.

After looking, they drew three views of the object. This student, for example, did a stapler from the side, the top, and the front. 

We will be starting our spring testing soon. We are technically having a “field test” this year with all new test materials and an online format for testing (not sure how well that will really work). Even though these scores will not be reported to families, we would like our students here to do as well as they possibly can. So we spent our last hour of the day doing an old CST math practice test as a review for it.

Homework:  (1) Do the chapter 10 study sheet for Horn Spoon. (2) Write five simple sentences and five compound sentences. This is a review - we will be starting to look at complex sentences tomorrow. (3) Do More What’s X? 1. (4) Do Exponents 1. 

Short Day, Short Post

It was pretty calm and focused for the last day before Spring Break! We checked, corrected, and discussed homework. We went to the library. We took math tests. We watched the last part of the American Experience film on the transcontinental railroad. We finished final drafts of our comparisons of Dolores Huerta and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Homework: None! Enjoy the break!

Humpty Dumpty

Today we had tested Humpty Dumpty inventions. Students from rooms 16, 18, and 19 participated. The students took an uncooked egg - still in the shell, of course - and put it inside some kind of protective “apparatus.” They could design their Humpty Dumpty any way that wanted as long as it was not too large. 

Mrs. Cha climbed up on a ladder and started dropping the Humpty Dumpties. 

We all waited breathlessly as each one fell to earth.

After all of them had fallen, the students began to open their apparatuses to see if the egg was still intact. There were big smiles if it didn’t break.

Sometimes even the egg seemed to be smiling.

There were some unusual things used to protect the egg. Sometimes borrowed footwear worked surprisingly well.

So did peanut butter, though taking the egg out was vaguely disgusting.

Of course, there were some disappointments when it turned out that Humpty Dumpty could not be put back together again.

The rest of the day was pretty ordinary. We corrected and discussed our homework, watched another part of the American Experience documentary on the Transcontinental Railroad, did a quick Science demonstration on acid rain, and talked about using logic to solve problems in math. 

Homework:  (1) Do pages 348 and 349 in the Practice book. (2) Do the railroad time table activity paper. (3) Read the section in the Science book on weathering and answer the questions on the study sheet. (4) Do Rational Numbers 4. (5) Do pages 460-463 in the math book. 

Remember, tomorrow is a MINIMUM DAY. Dismissal at 12:35. 

Breaking Up Rocks

Today was a pretty uneventful day for the students at Third Street. The arrival of the “ESL Police” from the downtown offices drove the adults a little nuts, but the students will happily unaware of all that drama.

Our most fun thing today was working on weathering rocks. We’ve been talking about the rock cycle and how different rocks can turn into other rocks. We also have talked about the importance of weathering here. Today we let the students experience it by putting some pieces of limestone in a plastic jar and shaking them as hard as we could.

It was noisy!

Afterwards the student emptied out the jars and looked at the residue with a hand lens.

Homework:  (1) Do pages 343 and 345 in the Practice book. (2) Do the By the Great Horn Spoon! study sheet for chapter 9. Also do the activity sheet on drawing the Lady Wilma and If I Found Gold. (3) Do Rational Numbers 3. (4) Do page 457-458 in the math book.  

Granite and Railroads

Our day started with some independent work from our Treasures book. It’s interesting for me as a teacher to discover just how much of this material they can master on their own! Maybe that is because it is easy; more likely we just have a lot of smart kids in room 19. So we went on to reading and discussing chapter 7 of by The Great Horn Spoon! 

After recess, we figured out what minerals make up granite. The students figured out that they could eliminate calcite as a possibility if they used the acid test - soaked it in vinegar and looked for evidence of bubbling. 

In History, we started our look at the great Transcontinental Railroad. The students learned not only about the making of the railroad, but also about how it tied into the civil war. Notice that none of the route even come close to the Confederacy.

And as always, they were disappointed to learn that the golden spike is now in a museum and not some place where they can dig it up and get rich quick!

Homework:  (1) Do pages 338-340 in the Practice book. (2) Do Great Horn Spoon chapter 7 study sheet. (3) Do "Linking East to West" study guide. Also do the crossword puzzle in the California history newspaper. (4) Do “Finding Combinations" on 452-453 of the math book. (5) Do the Ratio and Percentage sheet. 

The Egg Drop is Thursdays. This is NOT an optional activity. 

After the Festivities

Those of you who were able to make it to Open House last night saw not only some great regular work the students had done, but also saw a few outstanding Science Fair projects in our classroom. Congratulations to all our students who decided to participate:  every one of you did a great job.

Today was rather less exciting. We went to library as we usually do on Fridays, and Mrs. Denson read a bit to the students when they were finished picking out their own books. 

The rest of the day was mostly spent taking reading, spelling, and math tests, and, of course, also correcting and discussing them. The results are already on the grade book. 

In the afternoon, we had a little bit of time in the auditorium to work on Annie. The play is coming along quite well.

Homework:  Weirdly enough, none today. Enjoy your weekend. Hope to see many of you Sunday at CicLAvia. 

Open House Today

We started out this morning with a variety independent work time activities. The one the students liked the best was creating word searches of their own out of their spelling words. The ones they made were WAY HARDER than the ones I make for them. They exchanged them later in the morning and tried to solve. Of course, words written on the diagonal BACKWARDS were hard to find!

In Science, we practiced identifying minerals again. We are looking at the different minerals which make up granite. The students did a remarkably well in identifying feldspar, hornblende, and mica as well as figuring out which one was actually the granite.

I hope to see many of you at Open House this evening. Upper grade visitations are from 6:00 to 7:00.

Homework:  (1) Do the final What’s X practice sheet for the week. (2) Do Guided and Independent Practice on pages 444-445 in the math book as well as Test Prep on 438-439. The answer sheet has the wrong page numbers, alas. 

Getting Ready

There’s sooo much stuff to do to get ready for Open House. I sure wish I had a week more. So, let me assure you that we did some good solid work today, and just list today’s homework.

Homework:  (1) Do the By the Great Horn Spoon! study questions. (2) Do the “Butler” page. “Latitude and Longitude” is optional. (3) Do the “New Links to the East” comprehension sheet. (4) Do the Morse Code activity paper. (5) Do “What’s X?”. (6) Do “Rotational Symmetry” on 442-443 of the math book. 

Quick Post

Homework: (1) Write sentences using the homophone pairs. (2) Read "In Search of Gold," pages 706-707. (3) Do pages 326-328 in the Practice book. (4) Do What's X?" (5) Do 440-441 in the math book.