I’m back! Also, TOMORROW IS EARLY RELEASE. We have a modified morning schedule and students will be dismissed at 12:30.
Mrs. Alford said the students were pretty good yesterday. I was very happy to hear this.
Unfortunately right after I read a favorable note from Mrs. Alford, I was met with 14 students who did not do their homework. This was very disheartening. I understand that I did not update the website yesterday, but Mrs. Alford was very clear with what was homework, as was evidenced by the 9 students who turned it in without a problem. As a consequence students who did not have all of their homework spent their lunch time in the classroom finishing said homework while they ate.
This morning we had our fun run! The kids ran their little hearts out, and were absolutely soaked by the end. Almost everyone in the classroom got a full 35 laps in!
I will be sending home envelopes to collect final pledges tomorrow, or you can also send in your pledge via the www.funrun.com website. Thank you so much to everyone for helping with this. We really appreciate the outpouring of support we received.
We spent what little time we had this morning doing language arts rotations.
We are focusing on finding the main idea and writing summaries for short passages. Tonight the students have another short passage to read and summarize (on a separate sheet of paper). The summary should focus on the who/what/where/when/why of the passage.
There are also some questions to answer, and these should be accompanied by REASONING:
When I say reasoning, I mean a sentence that often begins with “I know this because….”. Then, I would like to hear why the student picked the answer. They should be as specific as possible. For instance:
I know this because it’s true. (This isn’t so great)
I know this because it said so in the passage. (This is kinda ok…)
BUT
I know this because it said so in the 3rd paragraph. (THIS is better)
We have also been working on our biome brochures , and I must say I am very impressed with what the students are doing so far. I look forward to seeing their finished products.
Next we measured our plants, and some of them are getting HUGE. I expect to see them begin to blossom any day now, and the vegetables will soon follow.
Finally we talked again about breaking difficult problems into smaller, easier to do problems. We also talked about how if we are multiplying 3-digit numbers, we are now breaking problems into even more pieces. Tonight students have 4 math problems to do, and as always there is an example!
so tl;dr
summarize this passage:
answer these questions with reasoning:
Do these math problems (with area models)
and read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
EARLY RELEASE TOMORROW!