Food Webs

A couple fine examples of the food webs that students
completed earlier in the week. Tomorrow in Science we
will be doing owl pellet dissection!

Locking Down Learning

This was a quiet and productive day. Students are continuing to do wonderful work in Independent Reading and I am really struck by their ability to use multiple strategies quite consciously to improve their comprehension. We finished reading "Food from the 'Hood" in the Open Court anthology. This is honestly a pretty boring informational article about students at Crenshaw High who started a successful business. Even though it is local and happened only about a decade ago, it might have 200 years ago in the middle of Zaire for all the kids care. One of the bad things about mandated curriculum is we cannot skip things which do not work in favor of things that do. Still, we made the best of it and used it as an opportunity to practice predicting, questioning, and connecting strategies. And we all sort of stayed awake....

After recess we went to the auditorium and worked with Mr. Lawton on music. The students are getting used to working with the Orff instruments, and they are making good progress with the composition assignment he has given them. I am anticipating that we will have a great performance for the parents on December 13th. I am not sure what the exact time will be yet. Save the date.

After lunch we corrected and discussed our homework. We also did our Writer's Workshop in the afternoon here. During this time we had a "lockdown" drill where the school is asked to practice the procedures we would use if there were an emergency like an armed intruder on campus. For us at Third Street, this sort of thing is not likely to happen. We did have to use the procedure once however when some hungry coyote wandered onto campus in search of some food or water. Poor thing!

Home Studies: (1) Do the Open Court pages including the "post-it note" page, the study questions, and the word search. (2) Read "Car Trouble" in StoryWorks, pp 16-21. Do the paragraph writing exercise, p 22 on a separate paper as directed. (3) Do the review pages in Math, pp 376-377. We will have a test tomorrow.

Good and Bad

A mixed bag of a day. The morning went wonderfully smoothly with reading and other language arts activities. I was a little disappointed though that quite a number of students had not finished the homework, particularly the food web, and many had to stay in during recess to finish it.

Tech Center did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. Mr. Abrams insists that all students must have the Internet use permission slip signed before they use the computers, and only a little more than half of our students had brought this in. The students who had signed sheets worked on Type to Learn, one of those programs designed to teach touch typing. The rest talked and drew pictures.... I hope everybody had a slip next week.

After lunch we checked and discussed the math, a good thing because there were quite a few misconceptions about the decimals. Children automatically assume that 0.61 has to be greater than 0.8 because 61 is bigger than 8. Lining numbers up by the decimal point to compare the place value comes naturally only after a lot of practice.

We had a number of students leave for orchestra after this, and a couple were dealing with Mr. Wilson about some their behavior during Tech Center. So with only about half of the class, we had a nice sockball game. We then came back and I finished reading Frindle.

Home Studies: Read "The Spider Woman," pp 8-12 in Storyworks. Write paragraph as directed on page 13.. Math, pages 372-375, #2-33, 35-37, 40-42.

Some Scenes from Friday's Field Trip

We took this picture after the field trip was over.
Here we are after we had lunch in the park across
the street from the Mission.

We saw some interesting things like this old organ in the
Mission museum.

Our guide was very sweet and knowledgeable about the
mission and its history.

Home Studies: Finish the food web paper. Do the Work Knowledge and Vocabulary from Context paper. Finish pages 368-369 in the Math book.

Prizes

Overall a pretty quiet and typical day, but we did have one wonderful bit of news today. Mrs. Koneff, our wonderful librarian, held a conference for the library's 50th anniversary. Students were invited to submit both posters and poems. Well, I am proud to say that both the winner and first runner-up for poetry in fourth grade came from room 19! Why didn't I think to bring the camera? Darn!

I am catching up on grading and letting students know what they need to get done before the grading period closes. We'll be giving some extra chances for some of the tests from earlier in the year in math, too, plus a few opportunities for extra credit in Science and History. Stay tuned. For now, the most important thing is to catch up in writing where most students (though not all) are missing a number of compositions.

Field trip on Friday to San Fernando Mission. Let me know if you can assist. This is a bus trip.

Home Studies: (1) Open Court packet on "Word Knowledge" and "Vocabulary from Context". (2) Open Court packet -- pages on "Point of View" and "Inflectional Endings". (3) Bring in a picture from a magazine or a newspaper showing somebody working in a job -- this is for the Concept/Question board. (4) Adding Fractions worksheet.

The Day After

Surprisingly normal for the day after Halloween. Nobody felt sick; nobody fell asleep in class. You must be fabulous parents (and children, of course).

Today I felt like we really put it all together in reading. We read together the story "Eddie, Inc." from the Open Court reader. It's not the best story in the world; in fact, it's pretty lame in parts. But it gave the students an opportunity to use their post-it notes to do "predicting", "connecting", and "questioning". We shared these as we went along to keep everyone focused on naming and using the strategies. Then, after we had finished reading, students had to use two additional strategies -- "summarizing" and "visualizing". For the latter of these two, I just had them draw a picture from the story. I did not forbid them from using the book, but I did encourage them to pick a scene other than one the illustrator had created.

We also had music with Mr. Lawton today. He was working with the students on understanding I-V harmony and to start to get the idea of the circle of fifths. It's pretty tough stuff, but a surprising number of the students really seemed to connect. They are getting used to the Orff instruments, and I'm glad that Mr. Lawton is the one to introduce these so that when we use our own Orff instruments later on the students will be used to it. He gave them a challenging assignment for next week to write a blues song; I'll be helping them with that.

The rest of the day was pretty routine: checking homework, correcting homework, doing journals, recess and lunch. But in elementary school routine days are the ones which make a difference. They're not the days that the students remember, but they're the days when learning really happens. So a good day.

Home Studies: (1) Subtraction with regrouping worksheet. (2) Science, page A 63, numbers 16-25. Answer in complete sentences! (3) Open Court reading packet.

Continue work on the blue math packet (due Monday) and complete the "Eddie" summary and picture if it has not yet been turned in.

A Quiet Day

Halloween is one of the least productive days of the year in many schools, but our principal at Third Street has always actively discouraged celebrations here, and that's a policy that works pretty well for me. I really do not enjoy children on the verge of insulin shock acting as loud and silly as possible. So I decided to leave the dressing up and the celebration for home and street, and to focus on learning instead.

And learn we did! They are continuing to really apply their reading strategies in their independent reading. We made a new concept / question board for the new Dreams to Jobs unit. We worked on Writer's Workshop stories. We reviewed some of our previous work in History, and started on the last study sheets for the Native Californians unit. Test coming up soon!

After lunch, we had worked on a multiplication review sheet, and did some Science review. We're a little behind where I'd like to be in Science, so next week we'll be working hard to catch up. We went out to PE. Many students went to orchestra at this time. And we gave them a little time to get all the odds and ends done at the end of the day so they could have a free evening.

Home Studies: Just in case not everything was finished during class for tomorroow they need to have (1) the Multiplying Money worksheet, (2) page A 62 in the Science book, and (3) the three History papers.

LACMA

We had our first field trip of the year today, and overall it went quite well. A big thanks to Faith's father for walking with us, as well as several parents from room 18 who helped.


The children has the opportunity this year not only to observe artworks, but also to use a sketch pad as a way to focus their attention on specific elements of the art such a line, light, color, or shape. Each group looked at different artworks, but I believe we all had an opportunity to look at David Hockney's famous Mulholland Drive shown above. I was impressed at the insightfulness of some of my students comments as we walked through the gallery.

The weather was pleasant, and we came back just as the bell was about to right.

Home Studies: Finish any work not done for Monday's homework.

First Field Trip Coming Up!

Sorry for being so silent for the last week or so. I was too sick to be an effective teacher, yet not really sick enough to justify being at home. I went through the motions, and we did learn some good things. We also learned the teacher is grumpy on cold medication. Anyhow, I feel better now, and I thank the many of you who offered your sympathy.

We corrected our Open Court Tests today -- well, the multiple-choice parts of it -- and the students did better than I expected they would. The vocabulary section is always the worst because the directions are confusing and while the students know the meaning of the word in the problems, many of the answer words are new to them. But most still did OK.

We read about the Mojave Indians and now they survived in the desert by developing agriculture. We continued work on a rhythmic-speech / body-percussion composition in Music. We discussed how it is possible to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators through the magic of finding a common denominator.

Home Studies: (1) Do the two pages introducing the Dreams to Jobs unit in Open Court. We probably will not get around to correcting this until Wednesday, however. (2) Finish the two pages about the Central Valley and Foothill Indians. This we will discuss tomorrow. (3) Begin the new packet in math. This will be due by next Monday.

For tomorrow's field trip, please be sure that your child has a lunch in a paper or plastic bag rather than a lunch box. We want to have to carry back as little as possible from the museum. Also, since we'll be walking, wear layered and light clothing and very comfortable shoes. We can still use a chaperone or two, so contact me if you're interested.

Another Short One

Again, between my cold (or flu) and the smoke made it a tough day for me, though we did get a lot done. I'm going home early, so here's just the homework.

Home Studies: (1) Spelling Review Wordsearch. (2) Complete and Incomplete Sentences -- on the backside of the worksheet. (3) Vocabulary Review. (4) Decimals and Fractions. (5) Equivalent Fractions.

Short Post

I'm sick and not sure how I made it through the day. But I did and we actually learned some stuff. More about that later.

Home Studies: (1) Spelling Scramble. (2) Common Proper Nouns. (3) Crossword puzzle. (4) Decimals and Fractions worksheet. (5) Adding Fractions worksheet. Be sure to reduce on this one.

Also, a few students need to finish the "The Coast" review sheet in History.

The language arts worksheets are getting the students ready for the dreaded first Open Court Assessment.

Cockles and Mussels

In Dublin's Fair City

Undoubtedly, Music with Mr. Lawton had to be the high point of the day. The students had an opportunity to learn about beat, rhythm, and melody through a couple really fun activities. First, he had them sing the old Irish song "Cockles and Mussels", explaining to them that people in open air markets used to chant the products they were selling. "Tomaaaatoooess! Fresh, juicy tomaaatoooes!" would be something they might have heard years ago. (In fact, I remember hearing some of this in Ireland only about 15 years ago though it had become unusual even then.) The song in is 6/8 time, so the students got to experience triple meter by tossing large empty cardboard boxes on the first and fourth beats. Once they had that skill down, he had them improvise chanting whatever they were selling like "Tech Decks! Cheap Teck Decks!" instead of "Cockles and Mussels". They had a blast.

Then they worked with chopsticks and boomwhackers to learn the difference between beat and rhythm as well as starting to get the idea of tonic (I) and dominant (V) in a scale. This was a little hard a times for them, but they after a few practice sessions they started to get pretty good at it.

Home Studies: (1) Simplest form worksheet. (2) Multiplication worksheet - on the back of the fraction sheet.

Robots

Some of our geometrical robots we made Tuesday.

Back in the Groove

A nice day. Everything when smoothly, and it felt good to be "back in the groove" after the weird day yesterday. We really did nothing particularly special -- read, checked homework, corrected a math test, and did PE. But I had a good time, and I think the students did too.

Homework: (1) Equivalent Fractions WS. (2) Open Court reading packet -- crossword puzzle, study questions, and reflection on theme.

Back to School?

First of all, let me say what a pleasure it was to meet so many of you again (and a couple of you for the first time) at this morning's Back-to-School Breakfast event. It was pretty informal in room 19, but we did give people a chance to sign up for December conferences. If you did not get a chance to stop by and sign up, please feel free to come by the room and put your name down for the best time available. Alternatively, email me and let me know what day and time (for example, Monday or Wednesday first thing in the morning) works best for you.

As far as the rest of the day went, well, it was OK. I imagine most parents probably think that these short days for teachers are something we enjoy. I mean, start school late, end early - what could be better? In reality any minor changes to the schedule leave children restless and make concentrated work difficult. I've learned that this "Back to School" day is right up there with the day before Thanksgiving in teaching difficulty. So I did what we usually do on those days, and kept things pretty simple and structured. So, it was all fine, but I was glad when the final bell rang and so I suspect were the kids.

We did our Independent Reading, and a little follow-up on the "Two Tickets" story. After recess we did a cute art project (pictures to follow tomorrow) and took the math test in the afternoon. A good day, but they were all watching the clock for that final bell and so was I. Tomorrow, we will have, in the immortal words of President Harding, "A Return to Normalcy."

Home Studies: (1) Do the Work Study and Vocabulary and Drawing Conclusions sheets for reading. (2) Do the Science questions. This section starts on page A46.

Starting to Put Things Together

We're coming up to the midpoint in the first grading period, and interim progress reports will be issued soon for students who are in danger of getting less the proficient grades in any of the main academic areas. You'll read more about that soon. It also means we are coming to the end of the first theme in Open Court.

I've had two major goals here. First, I wanted to introduce the students in a very structured way to the major reading strategies. I worked hard on this so that we can ultimately reduce the amount of time spent on OCR, and devote at least two days of the week to literature circles. The second goal was to give them a sense of fiction and nonfiction as distinct genres, and particularly to understand the predictable structure of most stories. I am less sure that many of them really understand this, so it's probably a goal which we will pursue in some form for most of the year.

We are working on a fantasy story now to help get a sense of this structure. This is the major homework students have for this weekend. They need to plan a story with some element of conflict which gets resolved during the course of the story, and to develop and describe characters who will do this in a particular setting or settings. We are incorporating Thinking Maps into this process - a bubble map for setting, a tree map for the characters, and a flow map for the plot - and writing a rough draft.

I'll let you know how the first drafts look on Monday or Tuesday. We'll probably have to do extensive revisions in the second drafts, but I hope that by the time they are finished with this they will not only get the idea of story structure and fantasy as a genre, but will have a nice little illustrated book as well.

Home Studies: (1) Do the prewriting and rough draft of the story as described above. (2) Finish the math packet if possible.

Some of our Magic Carpets

Reading Strategically

I'm excited about reading this year in room 19. I have done more than ever in teaching children explicitly how to use reading strategies and I am really impressed at how well they are applying them. Today we read the story "The Girl who Loved the Wind" in the Open Court anthology, and the students were allowed to pick any strategy to use as they read. They showed a particular fondness for "Asking Questions" -- and darn good questions they were! -- but they also make predictions and did "Making Connections" quite well too! I am confident that when we begin our literature circles later this month they will be quite adept at using the strategies on some really high quality books.

Students are also doing incredibly well with their independent reading. This was the first year that I made the students write daily entries about their reading, and it has been a great boon to comprehension and accountability. Everybody is reading and showing evidence of comprehension, too. I have not yet been responding as much as I would like with suggestions for other books, but that will follow in time. Independent reading, according to education researchers, is the single best predictor of academic success, and it looks like our students in this fourth grade class are well on their way to finishing high school and entering college!

We went to the auditorium to work with Mr. Lawton today in music. They had a lot of fun with the boomwhackers, but I unfortunately forgot to bring the camera along. We'll have some pictures soon of them playing with these tuned plastic tubes. Mr. Lawton, like me, as some background in the Orff-Schulwerk method of music education and I am really excited by all the great things he is starting to do with the children this year.

Home Studies: (1) Finish the multiplication worksheet. This was a little unplanned review, but the students were quite restless after lunch, and they needed some very structured work to help them focus. Most are almost done with this. (2) Do as much as possible with the math packet. They have a couple more days on it, but if they can finish and correct it before the test day I have more opportunity to work on misconceptions.

Frontloading

The back pain is getting a little better each day, but I'm taking it pretty easy in the classroom. The students are being helpful, and if there's a little less work than usual, well, they're hiding their disappointment well.

Today we worked on "frontloading" our next story. This is one of the new buzz words in education, and it just means doing some activity which helps get children ready for the next group of lessons. In our case, we are getting ready for "The Girl Who Loved the Wind," a story by Jane Yolen based on a variety of Persian tales. Since a magic carpet is featured in the story, we wrote fantasies about what we would do if we had a magic carpet. It was quite surprising how different the many stories were.

The students also began to make their own magic carpet. Most needed to take these home to finish, but we'll take some pictures and have them on the blog tomorrow. They look like they'll be great, too.

Other than that, a normal Wednesday. Some students had orchestra, and we went to PE.

Home Studies: (1) Finish the Magic Carpet story and picture. (2) Do the social studies worksheet.

Suffering and Celebration

Today was more notable for what I did than for what the children did. I somehow pulled some muscle in my back, and from recess on spent the day in near excruciating pain. Even this evening Vicodin doesn't seem to be doing much to ease my suffering. I sure hope tomorrow is better. I'm heading off for bed and the heating pad. I hope that this isn't what happens after you turn 50...

Home Studies: A photocopier breakdown at school eased the students' homework suffering and they had only two short papers to complete. I had to leave a little early to go downtown to deal with a financial matter, so they even had a half hour to get it finished before they left.

Mr. Lawton teaches the class the Mexican work chant, "Bate, Bate, Chocolate."

Students begin the process of writing their own lyrics to a traditional tune.

Bate, Bate, Chocolate!

We did a couple particularly interesting things today. First, we revisited the "Mae Jemison: Space Scientist" story by making multi-flow maps of Ms. Jemison's life. The multi-flow map helps the students explore the concept of cause and effect. They had to think about what events allowed Mae to become the first African-American woman in space, and then what subsequent events happened because of this. This was hard for some of them. They wanted to pick anything from her life and make it a cause, instead of thinking what in particular motivated her to become an astronaut. Quite a number of students will need to finish this one as part of their homework tonight, but many used their time wisely and completed the assignment.

After recess we went to the auditorium and had music instruction with Mr. Richard Lawton. Most of the students knew Mr. Lawton from last year, and he was able to build on some of the skills he developed with them in third grade. They had a lot of fun developing their sense of rhythmic speech on an old Mexican chant, "Bate, bate, chocolate." They worked with him to write a 4 line song lyric: again, many will need to finish it at home, though this will not be due until Tuesday.

After recess we reviewed the science test and read a little more from the science book. They will have some follow-up on this tomorrow. We also discussed three strategies for finding an equivalent fraction: drawing a picture, using fraction cubes, and the standard algorithm (multiply or divide numerator and denominator by the same number). Although the last way is by far the fastest, the students need to know all three because the other two, particularly the drawing, actually demonstrates mastery of the concept.

Home Studies: (1) Complete the Open Court reading packet by tomorrow. (2) If necessary, finish the Jemison flow map by tomorrow. (3) Continue work on the math packet. Students should be finished with the second of third assignment here.

Since we have been giving time in the morning for reading and journals, this is not part of the homework tonight.

Dull but Good

Today was sort of boring. But it was still productive.

The big thing we did today was take the first History test. It was harder than expected for a lot of students. They were allowed to use their notes, of course, but I even gave the permission to use their books if needed for this particular test. The test took all the time from recess to PE for most of the students, and a couple still need to do some more on it.

I am nearly finished grading the Science tests, and an email should be going home soon with the results there. It may take me a few days, though, to get through the History exams.

Home Studies: (1) Finish the Jemison summary, if not turned in already. (2) Finish the final drafts and the cover of the 8 Thinking Map compositions. (3) Continue work on the Math packet if you understand it. We will be discussing this more in class, particularly equivalent fractions, so just postpone work if confused. It will be come clear!

Learning to represent fractions as parts of a whole and as parts of a set.

Using fraction bars to find equivalent fractions.

All Things Being Equal

Gosh, what a pleasant day. Everything went so smoothly. We began with our Sustained Silent Reading time. The journals this week are 1000 times better than they were the first week; the students are really getting the idea of both logging their daily reading and summarizing as they go. We'll start pressing soon to add a few other strategies like "Making Connections" and "Predicting", but for now it couldn't be better.

We continued our work on the "Asking Questions" strategy, this time using the OCR text. The students read the story "Mae Jemison: Space Scientist" aloud, and as we were reading the used post-it notes to annotate the text with their questions. We shared some of these as we went along, and then when we were towards the end of our Open Court time, the students took the post-it notes out of their books and put them on a piece of paper together with the quoted section from the text which had provoked the question. For example, on page 80 of the text, Mae just goes to medical school. The author provided no background for this decision and one student wrote, "Just why does she want to go to Medical School?" What a great example of "Questioning the Author"!

We took our Science test after lunch. It may take a few days to get these graded and posted on the website, but we will let you know how they did. Incidentally, if you did not have a chance to read Sandy Bank's column in today Los Angeles Times about receiving email notifications of grades, do read it. I think it's both amusing and relevant.

The last 45 minutes was a little noisy, but it was good noise. We introduced the concept of equivalent fractions today and used fraction bars for the first time. You can see these in the pictures above. New math manipulatives always put children in a more playful than studious mood, but they quickly and quite visually grasped the idea that certain fractions like 6/12, even though they appear large, are really the same as a smaller-looking fraction like 1/2.

Home Studies: (1) Open Court packet -- this should be a fairly fast one. (2) Begin work on Math packet. This will be due no later than October 15, but it would be great if it were finished and corrected well before then.

Since students did reading in the morning, no reading is required as part of the homework.

Sun and shade

This is the elodea which was left in the sun over the weekend. See how much air is now in the top of the test tube.

This elodea spent the wekend in the dark. Note that the test tube is still mostly filled with water, not air.

Questioning

A much calmer day. Friday I was just about ready to set my hair - well, what's left of it - on fire by 2:30, but today I was sorry to see everybody go.

We started off today with silent reading. This will be a pattern for most of the students now that the Thinking Maps project is basically finished. I worked with one student to complete the oral part of the CELDT test while the other students not only did their silent reading but completed the reading journal. You'll notice that does not appear as part of the homework tonight, though, of course, they can read some more if they have the time.

We worked on "Asking Questions" as a reading strategy. This is an important, but somewhat hard, skill for students. Fourth grade students are generally pretty passive when they read, and it never occurs to most of them to challenge a character in a story, much less the author. Yet that is just what good readers do all the time. Good readers ask, "Why the heck is the author doing this? Why did she pick this setting? Why give the character that name?" That's just what we tried to help the students do today. They read a bit of the YA classic The Great Gilly Hopkins and as they read the first chapter -- which I had photocopied for them -- they wrote questions which we shared as we went along. The questions, to be sure, could have been tougher. But just asking any questions, just challenging the text in any form, was a new experience for most of the students. We'll practice it some more on the Open Court text tomorrow.

After recess the students had a chance to look at the results of Friday's science experiment. They were surprised to discover how the elodea which had been left in the sun suddenly had so much air in the test tubes compared with the shade control. They were not completely sure why. Most felt that evaporation was the key, but others identified photosynthesis as the likely cause. Which of these two it is was less the point than the idea of making an experiment, and controlling it for only one variable.

The rest of the day was pretty routine. I read a chapter of The Witches; we identified rhythmic patterns in groups of words; we exercised and continued the kickball tournament; and finally we talked about fractions of a whole and fractions of a set.

Home Studies: (1) Complete the Science review, pages A34-35. There will be a test on Science tomorrow. (2) Do the "Natural Resources" study sheet. There will be a social studies test on Wednesday. (3) Do the "Multiplying by One Digit" worksheet. We did not discuss this in class, but it is a third grade skill. If your child has trouble with it, let me know.

Science Experiment

Elodea

The day began with an assembly about the gift wrap drive, and I've learned to dread these little pep rallies. For some reason, any change in the schedule, even a small one, can make the students agitated all day. Add to that some guy who promises them that they can ride in a Hummer limousine and the concentration becomes nearly impossible.

So it was, at best, an OK day. But we did have one high point, as you can see above, and that was our science experiment. We did this jointly with room 18 as we had most of the stuff needed and even more to spare. They supplied us with some boba drink tops, a neat substitution for the nearly-impossible-to-find funnels. Here's how the experiment went. Students had to put a piece of elodea (that's the aquarium plant I'm holding in the pictures above) under the boba top with a test tube sticking out of it. This odd arrangement was mostly covered by water in a plastic shoe box. Some of these will spend the weekend out in the sunshine, while others will be in the closet in the dark. What will happen? We'll see!

Home Studies: Do the final study sheet on the first chapter of the Science questions. Do the subtraction worksheet.

CELDT out!

Today we finished the main part of the CELDT (California English Language Development Test) and I'm glad it's over! Mrs. Cha took all the fourth graders who are English Learners to administer this test on Tuesday and today. She had seven of my students and I had nine of her students. It was hard to get things really accomplished with so many people absent and a group of other students in the room, too.

But we do have somethings to boast about. The students have finally completed the eight "About Me" compositions we did to help them learn about Thinking Maps, and several have already bound them into our first books. They were quite proud of themselves, and when the other students saw the finished product they were suddenly incredibly motivated to finish their own!

We took a math test that we will grade tomorrow. We also prepared for doing a science experiment tomorrow. We continued listening to The Witches. We read an amusing play version of The Emperor's New Clothes and we read an account of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Students have a little homework related to this tonight.

Home Studies: (1) Continue independent reading and writing in logs. (2) Do "Sentence Chef," Storyworks, page 15. (3) Do the two Open Court worksheet pages. These are numbered 29-31 on the very bottom in small print. (4) Finally, do the Subtraction Practice worksheet.

Inferring

It's an odd thing about school. Sometimes it just seems to make students less smart than they ordinarily are.

This happens a lot during reading. Students who can otherwise make intelligent comments and observations will often just be lost when a teacher asks a questions which is not "on the page." They start to look a little confused and agitated even when the question begins "Why do you think..." I suppose this is because so often in school we are focused on reading carefully and correctly that we forget that the purpose of reading is to promote thinking. So students get into the habit of plodding from word to work, reading the words fairly smoothly, but often not bothering to think what they mean.

We've been working on this problem. We've tackled a couple big thinking skills in reading already - predicting and making connections. We continued on this today by looking at a specific reading skill, the ability to make inferences. I began my lesson by explaining to the students that they were already expert at making inferences, and they proved this to me when I gave them a few facts about an imaginary situation. For example, I told them that they could not see the TV screen but that they heard someone say "doughnuts" and another person say, "Excellent!" They knew immediately that The Simpsons had to be the show on TV. I explained that they had used what they already knew (in this case, Homer's and Mr. Burns' favorite expressions) in order to make this inference.

We then tried to practice the skill on our Open Court story. We had visitors from the Local District looking at our implementation of the reading program, so we used the workbook as our tool today to do this. I will not say that the students were thrilled by the work we did, but they did seem to clearly master the skill. We will continue to work on the skill, though in the future we will be more likely to use post-it notes, reading logs, and graphic organizers to help us here.

The rest of the day was pretty routine. We finished up reading the first chapter of the science book, and most of them finished the chapter 2 math assignments and checked them. A number of students went off to orchestra orientation while the rest of the students went to PE.

Home Studies: (1) Reading, 15 to 30 minutes plus entry in reading log. (2) Open Court Reading worksheets -- Sarah study questions, the crossword puzzles, and the Crazy sentences. (3) Finish the math packet, if not already done.

Not much Today

Not feeling well today, so just a quick note.

Home Studies: (1) Independent Reading, including the reading journal. (2) Continue work on the chapter 2 math assignment sheet. This is due Thursday, but it would be great if it could be done and checked earlier.

No Monday Moaning Here

Well, another fine day in room 19. We did a lot of focused work today in a variety of areas. We worked on two final drafts of our Thinking Maps compositions. We have only one more map to do -- the Bridge Map -- and then we will be culminating our project by making our books and probably taking a quiz on the eight maps. In Open Court we did practiced our predicting and making connections strategy using the post-it notes. Our story this week is an excerpt from the book Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia McLaughlin. This is quite an affecting story of a young woman from Maine who marries a widower with two children living somewhere on the Great Plains during the late 19th century. The students were particularly moved when they learned that the mother had died in childbirth.

We changed seats today just before going to recess. It takes me a couple of weeks to get a good feeling for each child's personality and to know what seat would provide the best opportunity for focus and constructive collaboration. After recess I gave students an opportunity to work on the latest History packet pages. All of them will be doing some -- or a lot -- of work tonight to finish these, but I wanted them to understand what I am looking for in these study guide assignments and how they will be helpful to them on the test. (Of course, the most basic reason for creating the assignments is to sharpen reading and thinking skills, but talking about that is not motivating for the fourth grade mind!)

After lunch we continued work on our Writer's Workshop compositions. A number of these are quite creative, and I look forward to publishing some of them shortly. We had PE where we continued our kickball tournament as well as working on cardiovascular fitness. We concluded with some Math workshop time, and I gave a mini-lesson on rounding with them.

Home Studies: (1) Independent reading and writing summaries in log. (2) Conclude work on the History packets pages for lessons 3 and 4 of chapter 1. (3) Continue work on math pages. These should be finished by Thursday at the latest, but earlier is even better.

Cause and Effect

Again, a really nice day overall.

We began today with a look at our seventh Thinking Map, the Multi-Flow map. This diagram looks a bit like one of those flow charts they use to teach computer programing in Basic. Its purpose is to help students to understand the ideas of cause and effect. Now this is a surprisingly hard idea for the fourth grade mind. Children are accustomed to the idea of sequence -- indeed, in compositions just about every sentence can begin with the word "then" -- but understanding that one thing happens because of, or in response to another action, is not something that they easily grasp. And yet no concept is more important for Science or History or even literature.

Our Multi-Flow Map was about "My Dream." The students were asked to think of what they would ideally like to achieve in their lives. They had some interesting choices. Many wanted to be actresses or sports superstars, of course, but others chose such realistic goals as zookeeper or fashion designers. They were then asked to think of what they would have to do to achieve that goal. Many were pretty accurate about understanding the prerequisites for the field they chose. They did tend to underestimate the price of mansions in Beverly Hills, however.

We reviewed the Toto story, looking this time to "make connections" between the text and their own lives. I'll talk more about that tomorrow. We also corrected the math test. This was a mixed result -- many excellent scores, but also a number of disappointing ones. We'll do some review here, particularly with the students who need it, and take the alternative form of the test in a week or so. We'll give the better of the two scores to the students.

We worked a little more on music today. This was the only rough point of the day. Doing some of the basic preparation activities for singing, exercises things involving breathing and vocal control seemed to bring out a particularly silly side in some of the boys. It was much better when we moved on to working on finding the rhythm in jump rope rhymes. We'll be developing a beginning sense of rhythmic notation from this as well as learning to change these chants into body percussion pieces.

The end of the day was a kind of workshop where students could work on math or the language arts homework. It was peaceful and everybody was working quite intently.

Home Studies: (1) Independent Reading. I will be collecting the first group of journals tomorrow. (2) "Toto" story packet. There are quite a few pages here, and the most important of these are the three pages of questions in the middle of the packet. (3) We started the second math assignment sheet. This will be due September 27.

Review for the Math Test

Best Yet

What a nice day! The was easily the smoothest, most pleasant day of the year so far. Not that the others were bad, but this was just about perfect!

We keep working diligently through our Thinking Maps, and today we worked on the Brace Map. This is not an easy map for the children to either understand or make, at least at first. The Brace Map works on the skill of understanding the relationship of the whole and its parts. It only applies, however, to things which are tangible, which can actually be put together or taken apart. We talked about this at some length until I felt they had the idea. I then challenged them to create their own. As always, the topic was something about them. Now the assigned topic here in the training manual is "My Best Outfit." I find, however, that most of the boys, and even a few of the girls, hate writing about this. As a bit of a slob myself, it's not an easy topic for me, either. So I gave them the option of writing about "My Favorite Meal" instead, and most of them seemed to enjoy that one.

I then had to change my plans when I runner reminded me that I was supposed to send selected students to the auditorium to discuss possibly being in orchestra next year. Almost half of the class qualified for this privilege, so I gave the remaining students the option of correcting math or working on Writer's Workshop. It was pleasant and quiet and productive.

After recess we did a little review for the math test, touching on all the important points. We then read a chapter from the social studies book on bodies of water in California. Dull, but important stuff for understanding the state. We looked at our mealworms again after lunch. Many had died, but a couple had changed into beetles or were in the process of doing so. We also read a short, and frankly pretty trite, story from the Scholastic magazine. We continued with our kickball tournament in PE. After PE, we came in and took the math test. We'll correct it soon and get the results on the gradebook.

Home Studies: (1) Do independent reading. Remember, students should read for at least 15 to 30 minutes daily and write about a half page summary in their journals. (2) Do the short vowel and Characterization worksheets on the Open Court Reading story. (3) Do the questions on the Adaptation chapter we read yesterday in the Science book. I added some page numbers to the questions to make this even easier.

"Beaks" and "Bugs"

Toto Landscapes

Happy Days

Well, we're back online again! Happy days are here again!

Just a wonderful day. We began by doing final drafts of our "My Favorite Things" composition we did yesterday. We've completed five of the eight Thinking Maps, and I think the students are getting the idea of monitoring their own thinking and using these simple graphic devices to focus their thinking.

Then we did something really neat. Yesterday we had noted descriptive language in the "Toto" story by writing the words or phrases on little yellow post-it notes. Today we shared some of the words and we used these to create some wonderful African landscapes. It was hard for a few of the students who are accustomed to relying on the illustrator instead of the author to help them form pictures, but the results were excellent. You can see some above.

After lunch we did another really neat Science activity. We used chopsticks, clothes pins, and spoons to imitate different types of beaks. The students used each one to pick up a variety of different types of foods such as gummy worms, rice, bird seed, etc. They had to figure out which type of "beak" was best adapted for each type of food. They had a great time, particularly eating the peanuts and sunflower seeds afterwards. That led us naturally into a reading of the Science text, and boy were they attentive. Hands-on science is hard work, but it's really worth it.

The rest of the day was devoted to finishing the math packet. I helped students who needed it, and some of the students who were already done also volunteered as tutors. We'll be having a test on this tomorrow after doing some review.

Home Studies: (1) Do independent reading. Remember, students should read for at least 15 to 30 minutes daily and write about a half page summary in their journals. (2) If not already done, finish the math packet. There will be time to do some correcting tomorrow, but no more work on it in class.

Making Mental Movies

I hate to be making the same excuse over and over again, but we continue to have to network connections at much of Third Street, particularly in room 19. It's been a week now. I'm sorry again for a late post, but when I come home in the afternoon Miss Edie just demands a walk, and then there's dinner to make, and before I know it, it's 9:00 pm.

Other than the computer problems, a splendid, if fairly routine, day. I'd like to just focus on one key thing we worked on today. And that is the skill of making mental movies. Now, this is something that kids are do pretty well. In fact, we adults complain all the time that they are "daydreaming" when they should be doing something we deem more productive. Yet somehow they have trouble taking this natural aptitude and applying it to reading. I suppose that our obsession with making sure that they read correctly and quickly has a lot to do with it. But the results of not "daydreaming" while you read are quite bad, almost tragic.

Reading really isn't about how correctly or rapidly you recognize the words. Instead, it's about getting meaning from print. And to do that, readers need to become absorb the ideas, not the words. For fiction, and for a lot of nonfiction too, this means that they need to be able to "see" the setting, the characters, and the events in the story. They need to combine the description that the author provides with stuff from their own life and turn it into a mental movie. Good readers don't read books, the "watch" them. That's why a good reader almost always finds the Hollywood version of a favorite book so disappointing: our brains are capable of the most fabulous special effects, far better than anything Industrial Light and Magic can do, and the actors we cast in out heads are so much more talented than the ones who hold SAG cards.

All of this takes a little willingness to pause from reading and to let the pictures form in our heads. It's a skill everybody can learn, though it may seem awkward at first. It's particularly hard to practice this at school where you are sure that everybody else is looking at you, and where the teacher always seems to be perpetually in a "hurry up" mood. We are working on this skill however in our busy classroom. Today as we read the wonderful "Toto" story in the Open Court text -- I think it's the best selection in the book -- the students looked for descriptive words and put them on post-it notes. Tomorrow they will look for some more, and after we share these we will work on creating first a mental picture and then making an actual color picture just from the words. It should be interesting. Keep tuned to see some of the results!

Home Studies: (1) Independent Reading: Students should be reading about 30 minutes each evening and writing a short -- roughly half page -- entry in their reading journals. I will start collecting these Friday. (2) Finish the chapter in the math book, if not already done, by Wednesday at the latest. (3) Finish the History packet. We started this one in class. (4) Do the two fairly short Open Court pages.

Mealworms

Student explore the needs of mealworms for different
types of food, and the difference sunlight makes on mealworm
behavior. These young scholars are excited about learning!

There's Got to be a Morning After

Sorry again for the late posting, but the network problem I mentioned on Monday still has not yet been solved. The district sent out two young guys today who sported stylish haircuts and expensive laptops, but they did not seem to actually get anything done. Sigh.

After our wonderful meeting last night I confess I decided to sleep in this morning. So I arrived at school in a great mood, with little actually prepared to teach them for the day. But, ah, this is when 20 years of teaching experience comes in handy. I pulled some tried and true lessons out of the hat, and we had a great day.

We continued our study of Thinking Maps with the Flow Map. This is one of the most useful of all the Thinking Maps because it works on sequencing, an all-purpose elementary school thought process. We did two activities with the map. First, we did one of the best parts of the autobiography project, a composition about "My Perfect Day." The idea for this writing assignment is sort of a combination of Queen for a Day and 24. The students have all the money they want or need, but only 1 day, and they have to put together a morning, afternoon, and evening of perfect activities. We shared some of these, and a couple were really quite touching. After that, we revisited the "Mrs. Frisby" story from Open Court. We talked about the four basic phases of plot development - exposition, rising action, climax, and falling action - and traced these through this selection. Students than made a Flow Map of the story, making their own illustrations of each important phases.

After recess, we returned to the room where we read the next section of the social studies book about the four regions of California -- the coast, the Central Valley, the mountains, and the deserts. This is not the most stimulating stuff for the kids - other than learning that we have an active volcano somewhere in the state - but it is important for them to know the geographical context in which the history takes place. We had done some maps of these regions Tuesday, so at least the idea of the regions was a little familiar to them.

Lunch was uninspiring - who decided that ranch dressing is the perfect accompaniment for peanut butter and jelly? - but we had a lot of fun when we came back to the room. We began our study of singing today by teaching the children how to stand and how to breath. This is very important for good vocal production, but they find it pretty strange, if not downright weird. We also worked on finding the beat in some short bits of piano music I have on a CD. Students used their bodies as pendulums to show the duple-meter beats. We continued this discussion of beat, rhythm, and meter by again using the "Marco Polo" jump rope chant, this time by adding the technique of body percussion. Fourth grade students love to slap themselves, stomp their feet, and click their fingers. I also brought in a simplified system of stick figures to indicate divide and undivided beats. This will prepare them to read standard musical notation later on.

PE was much the same as Monday - warmups, laps, and activity rotations. After we returned to the classroom we took some time to work on math, doing more with our base 5, base 12 counting and also to work on a "Problem of the Day," a slightly open-ended math problem which also requires the students to explain how they came to the correct answer. These kinds of narrative explanations help me to decide who is truly advanced in their mathematics instincts.

Home Studies: (1) If your child did not complete either of the Thinking Map assignments those need to be turned in first thing on Friday. (2) Do new packet of follow-up materials for the "Frisby" story. (3) Continue work in the read math folders. We should have the self-correcting materials ready soon.

Hands On

Sorry for the late post, but the network went down almost as soon as the bell rang, and I had to finish this at home.

What a great day! It start out quietly, but after recess it built to a wonderful bang!

We began by doing final drafts of a couple compositions which students had done with their thinking maps last year. They finished the "All About Me" and "My Character" sections of the Thinking Maps autobiography project. By the end of the month all eight sections of this project should be written and revised and the students will make it into their first book of the year. As we usually do on Mondays, we shared stories about the fun things we did on our weekend. The students generally had more fun than I did! They're lucky to have such great parents and friends.

We then turned our attention to Open Court. Most of the students had brought pictures of somewhat risky activities, and then shared the risks and benefits of the activity with the class. I suppose when they have to do their first cost-benefit analysis in Economics they'll say, "Hmmm. Didn't we do that already in Fourth Grade?" We then went on to discuss and practice Predicting as a reading strategy. Research shows that good readers approach the text in different ways from poor readers, even when both can sound out the words equally well. We will be explicitly discussing and practicing these strategies. Today we discussed the role of making and checking predictions when the children read. We practice this using the first part of a wonderful picture book by Chris van Allsburg called Produtiti! I typed up the first five or six pages and left a column for the students to write their predictions and other comments as we went through the text slowly. They were a little confused at first about what we were doing, but they quickly got the hang of it. They made some pretty good predictions with a story that takes some odd twists.

Then the fun really began! We did our first science experiment today. "Hands on" science, as they like to call it these days, is fun, enriching, and absolutely exhausting at times. It's particularly like that when we're working with bugs! Today's experiment dealt with mealworms. We placed a small cup of bran meal, a cup filled with 20 corn flakes, and a small cup of water. We placed about 6 - 8 giant mealworms in each shoe box. After lunch, we came back to see what the mealworms are doing, and we will check on them again after lunch tomorrow. All of this is to see how organisms need, and meet their need for, food, water, air, and shelter.

We went off to PE where students did warmups, two laps, and rotations among three various sports/fitness stations. After that, we finished off by checking over the math pretest we took on Tuesday. They did surprisingly quite well on it!

Home Studies: Work on the two pages of Science questions and skills in the green Science folder.

I hope as many of you as possible will be able to come to our Back to School Activity tomorrow at 5:00 pm. You can bring small children with you in class, and a fully-credentialed LAUSD teacher will be available to supervise older children on the yard.

Exploring Shapes, Getting Fit

Great Day

I went to see Boris Godunov last night at the Hollywood Bowl. The soloists from the Kirov Opera were fantastic, and the orchestra sounded great from my friends' box seats. Unfortunately, I didn't get home until after midnight, and I was not looking forward to teaching on only five hours of sleep....

But the kids were super and we had a great day. We began the day correcting yesterday's math work. We went on to discuss the Circle Map, the graphic design used in the Thinking Map program to model describing. I find the Circle Map unnecessarily restrictive, since only adjectives can be used in all but one of the circles. But the students did quite well dealing with this rule, and they went on to write some good paragraphs about their personal characteristics. Monday and Tuesday we will do final drafts of the two compositions done so far, and then on Wednesday continue with the Double Bubble Map (which has nothing to do with chewing gum).

After that, we looked at the first page of the Open Court packet and discussed what "risks" and "consequences" were. It was a good discussion. The students then went on to create entries for our Concept/Question board. If you are not familiar with this feature of the Open Court program, I'll show a picture of it next week on the blog when it is more complete. It is a tool for creating communal knowledge about our theme as we go from selection to selection in the book.

After recess, we did an art project exploring geometric shapes and the color wheel. Students made a number of large, overlapping geometric shapes, and assigned a color to each. In areas where the colors overlapped, new colors were created. They continued this project after lunch. As we have previously done during music time, the students took time to reflect on the project in the Arts journals after they finished. When everybody was done we did a "gallery walk." This is a technique for positive self and peer evaluation. The students walked silently around the room and looked at everybody's work. I then asked who they thought done done a good job and why. It's a very supportive kind of critique which really helps the children grow as artists.

We went out to PE. Thankfully, the heat has subsided a little, and our exercise and laps were done fairly easily. After that, the children were able to choose sports/play areas for the remainder of the period. We came back from PE and watched a fun Bill Nye video about insects. Next week we will be doing an experiment with mealworms -- that's what the shoe boxes are for -- and we will be studying the topic of adaption in the textbook. The film helped give us some ideas to think about in preparation for this.

Home Studies: Light tonight -- the teacher has a lot of grading to do and needs a break already! Just bring in a picture from a magazine of something risky. This could be a good risk, like fire fighters entering a burning building, or a bad risk like doing drugs. Try to "think outside the box" here and come up with something original.