The students are adjusting well. Two days down, and no casualties yet!
This morning we had a little competition to see which groups could get a perfect score on the Math Case 21 working as a group. Two groups got REALLY close, and missed only 1. In general our performance on this Case 21 was the best out of the three, but I think we can do better.
In Language Arts today we talked a lot more about poetry. We talked about rhyming schemes, and that not every poem has to rhyme every line, or even every other line. We came up with a few poems as a class. Some of them were actually pretty neat:
The universe is big and black
now don’t you have a heart attack
it’s easy to get lost in space
no need to find a hiding place
And some….not so much:
penguins are black and white
Although they are slow
They put up a fight
And slide all around in the snow
Which led to a great discussion as to how we could improve things, and that we’re really never ‘done’ writing. Revising continues to be one of our weaker points. Many of our students are still of the “I filled the whole page, I am done!” school of thought. We will keep hitting on the idea that we can always go back, improve things, and completely change things if we so choose.
Tonight students should write a total of SIX 4-line poems. Two of the poems should have rhyming schemes of AABB. Two more should have schemes of ABAB, and the last two should be AABA. In case they need some extra help here is the handout we did together in class:
Students should also do a sentence for each of their next five vocabulary words. We purposely DID NOT go over these words. It is the students’ responsibility to figure these words out, and to come up with actual, correctly put together sentences for them. We will have many assignments like this in the upcoming weeks. This is to prepare them for middle school where they will often have to figure things out on their own, or they will be expected to actually study things beforehand on their own and come prepared.
In science we talked a lot about forces, gravity, and why our knees and legs were sore after we did a ton of dancing and singing to Hello, Goodbye by the Beetles. That was a TON of fun, by the way.
We talked about gravity, and then how Earth’s gravity affects all things equally regardless of mass. We watched this neat video:
And then before you know it we had a bit of DEAR time, and it was time to go.
Students got their report cards today. I have no idea why, but it AGAIN didn’t print some students’ comments. It printed this quarter’s comments fine, but then not some of the older quarters. *sigh*
Please take a look at the grades and the comments, and if there is anything you would like to discuss concerning your student’s progress, I would love to talk to you.
so, tl;dr
6 poems, 2 each of these rhyme schemes:
AABB
ABAB
AABA
5 sentences using our last 5 vocab words. Also they should fix any of their sentences that I circled this morning.
As always, read for 35 minutes!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter