Two Days

First, a couple scenes from Friday’s Walk-a-thon. Room 19 did quite well overall, coming in fourth in total contributions and being the ONLY class to have 100 percent participation. Thank you so much, students and families!

Today was a pretty quiet day. We went to the library, always a highlight of the week.

Homework:  (1) Do the usual Monday spelling assignments, including matching terms and definitions for these words with Latin roots. (2) Do the Charlotte Doyle evaluation. (3) Do the Exponents and Algebra paper. 

Science Fair project should be coming in by Wednesday. Also note the Friday Egg Drop assignment. This is a great little introduction to engineering for our students and it is always a hit. Thank you Mrs. Cha for arranging this for the entire fourth grade!

Vanishing

Today, combining a bit of visual art and math, we began work on double point vanishing perspective. This is initially a difficult concept for the students, but once they grasp it they start seeing the world a little differently. For this reason, it’s a great - if hard - lesson.

During our grade-level blocks, the fifth graders continued their work on their colony PowerPoints. The fourth graders did part two of the “Mock Rocks” experiment.

Here they were taking apart their mock rocks and examining the constituent “minerals”. We’ll be doing more with them tomorrow.

Homework:  (1) Do spelling practice as usual. Also do the spelling word search. (2) Do the math review sheet on fractions and geometry. 

Remember tomorrow is Walk-a-thon! We are almost at 100 percent participation. 

The Few, the Proud

Our fifth grade students were off at the Reagan Library today on a field trip, and I understand they had a great time. With only the fourth grader the room seemed a bit quiet, but they did excellent work. We started our Earth Science unit by examining “mock rocks.” Rocks and minerals are what we will be studying over the next few weeks.

We are also finally getting our mission posters and reports done. Today the students started on their reports using the Chromebooks, and many finished the posters. They’re done in the style of 1930’s Southern Pacific Railway travel posters. Many are wonderful!

Homework:  (1) Do the spelling jumble. (2) Finish the final draft of the Charlotte Doyle paper. (3) Do the math worksheet.

We Did It!

Our challenged was not only met, but exceeded! 

Homework:  None today!

Advanced Work

Quite a productive day! We did all the usual things at the beginning of the day. After recess, the students began writing a five-paragraph essay. I didn’t do this until eleventh grade, and didn’t get good at it until college. How much more advanced our room 19 scholars are than their teacher was! We are doing this by observing the changes in Charlotte Doyle’s personality over the course of the novel. This is also challenging the students to support their assertions with evidence from the text - a key skill in the Common Core State Standards.

Fifth graders are researching a colony they chose yesterday. All the tech resources that have become available to us recently are certainly helpful here. 

Fourth graders worked on their history test, and also started on a travel poster for their mission. We will be finishing this before Spring Break. I know we’ve talked about it for a while. 

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words twice in cursive. Write sentences for words 11-15. (2) Do the spelling crossword puzzle. (3) If necessary, finish the three body paragraphs of the essay on Charlotte Doyle. Most students did this in class. (4) Do “Area of Triangles.” (5) Do “Transformations and Congruence” and “Translations in Space”. (6) Do Fractions to Decimals 3. 

Quick Post

A very busy day…just the homework for now.

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words twice and do sentences for words 6-10. (2) Do the spelling jumble. (3) Finish the prewriting for the Charlotte Doyle paper. Students should have 3-4 words to describe Charlotte at the beginning, the middle, and the of the story. (4) Do the Circles paper. The back of this is challenging, but first convert find the fraction - for instance, Mar’s 2 moons are 2/60 of the total - and then convert that into a percentage. Multiply the percentage by 6, as each of the 60 moons represent 6 degrees of the circle. (5) Do the Area of Parallelograms paper. This should be fairly straightforward. (6) Do the fractions into decimals.

Pushing Ahead

We began by giving students some time to complete Friday’s quiz on decimal division. This is not an altogether easy skill, and we will continue to work on it. I’ll no doubt curve the results so that the average grade becomes a 3. During our recess grade level blocks, we went over Measuring Up as we have lately. While I normally resent the idea of spending time on test prep in class, this series is actually pretty intelligent and does cover a lot of the stuff in the Common Core standards that we might otherwise miss.

We also spent a good bit of time practicing Beauty and the Beast. It was only a short scene, but an important one with LOTS of action in it. Here the students are about to mime using a battering ram to attack the beast’s castle.

Homework:  (1) Do the first five spelling words. The PC with that file on it crashed today, so the words on on the bottom of the matching form. (2) Do spelling matching. (3) Do the Quadrilaterals paper. (4) Do the Area paper. (5) Do Fractions to Decimals 1.