Unfortunately we had only six people turn in their summaries for the reading last night. As such, the great majority of students today spent their lunch in the classroom eating and finishing their homework.
We had a talk about how the only way that we get better at something is by practicing. If we are not putting in the practice, we are not going to improve. Thus, not doing the practice is not an option.
In Language Arts we did some more writing and had some conferences about our stories so far. The students have some great ideas for their stories!
We next introduced some vocabulary words. We will be working with Greek and Latin roots a good deal this year. Students will receive lists of words, and we will do some word sorting, story writing, and other activities with them.
Tonight students should write a sentence using each word, for a total of ten sentences.
We talked about how each word on the list is a noun, and what sentences with nouns look like.
Something like “I biped him” or “He is very biped” doesn’t exactly make sense. However, something like “I am a biped” makes sense as biped is a noun.
Next we had another little pep rally about the boosterthon fundraiser. We will have a little pep rally each day before specials where students will watch a video of children around the world playing sports, and what sportsmanship looks like in other countries.
We then caught up on some of our Mysterious Benedict Society as we have fallen a tad behind and the students were insistent that we find out what was happening with our student secret agents!
Finally, we talked more about how we can turn difficult multiplication problems into simpler problems by breaking them down into pieces. Mathematics is all about breaking things down into easier to understand and perform operations, and understanding this from an early stage is important. We started doing a bit more complex problems, and multiplying three digit numbers using our area model/distributed property of multiplication over addition type strategies. Tonight students have 5 problems to do in this way (and there is of course an example as well):
The fifth problem is a thinker!
so, tl;dr
A lite night tonight:
Write a sentence for each of these vocabulary words. Use the word *correctly* as a noun in each sentence
Do the following problems by breaking them down into easier problems and using area models as we have been:
And as always, read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
P.S. If you didn’t get a chance, please check out the funrun post in yesterday’s update and register on funrun.com.