I’m sure you’ve already heard from the kids, but it was a fantastic field trip. We got to catch crabs, collect seashells, touch sharks, and do all sorts of really fun stuff.
I wanted to again thank our chaperones for volunteering their time to come with us on what was a very long trip. I got a pretty bad migraine on the bus ride back, but our wonderful chaperones kept things in line while I zoned out. So if you came to pick up your student on Friday and I was barely able to ask you to initial the sign-out sheet, I apologize.
Also many thanks to our PTA who purchased our snacks and our lunch, and helped out with the trip itself quite a bit.
Today, we finally started moving on to our unit on word problems. We will be examining word problems, and strategies for solving them. Often students can be perfectly capable of doing the math on a given problem, but run into a reading comprehension snag when figuring out what the problem is actually asking them to do. We talked about making sure that our answers make sense for what the question is asking, and to make sure that we don’t just pick an operation at random and just smash together numbers.
Students were given one worksheet to do in class in groups, and then another to do as homework. Both are due tomorrow.
In Language Arts, we talked again about figurative language, and then about the difference between literal and figurative meanings. Can you believe nobody knew what “bells and whistles” meant?! We’ll be going over a few different idioms each day to fix this.
Part of the students’ homework tonight is to find 3 examples of figurative language from the book they are currently reading. These can be metaphors, similes, hyperbole, personification, idioms, onomatopoeia, any type of figurative language at all. They should turn in a piece of paper with the name of their book, the 3 examples, the pages they found them on, and then identify the type of figurative language.
We also talked about our new vocabulary list, and the meanings of different prefixes, suffixes, and roots. I was really impressed with everyone’s ability to take words like bio (life) logy (study) and to come up with their meanings before they even got their word lists. We even went so far as to talk about words like microbiology and macrobiology. It was great.
Students should take their 10 words, and make one sentence for each word. This is also due tomorrow.
In Science we talked about heat, temperature, and the three different ways in which heat can be transferred: conduction, convection, and through radiation. Ask your student if they remember which is which!
so, tldr;
Math: 2 word problems worksheets. The majority of which should have been completed in class.
Language Arts:
3 examples of figurative language in the book they are currently reading
10 sentences using their bio words
The students were very well behaved and worked hard today. I look forward to a full week of the same!
-Mr. Potter