Very sorry about no update yesterday. I had a doctor’s appointment that kept me out of the classroom all day.
Our Substitute, Mrs. Thompson, told me that the students did a fantastic job while I was out, so today started on a great note.
In Math we started talking about volume.
When we are measuring distance, we use things like centimeters, meters, kilometers, inches, feet, etc etc
When we measure area, that doesn’t work anymore, so we have to start measuring with squares. We count how many squares we could fit into an area. So we measure two dimensional objects with things like square centimeters, square meters, etc etc
Well if we start talking about how much space an object like a box takes up, we can no longer use centimeters, or even square centimeters. Now we have to start measuring with things like cubic centimeters, cubic feet, etc etc
Today we took lots of different boxes, and figured out how many cubes (pop cubes) we could fit inside of them. This is the way that we measure volume: we find out how many cubic units can fit inside of a given shape.
Today we were dealing with rectangular prisms, and found that if we can find how many cubes will lay along the bottom of a box, we can then simply multiply that number by the height of the box to find out its volume.
Tonight students have some basic volume activities to do. These should be fairly straightforward, and I just need them to be thinking about how volume is a different measurement than distance and area that we have done so much of up to this point.
We then spent a lot of time talking about figurative language, and how we can use it to make our poetry more interesting. We had some difficulties at the end of 3rd quarter with some of the different types of figurative language, so we did a quick review of our types of figurative language. We then examined some poems together and found the figurative language in them. Tonight students have another poem in which to find figurative language. They should find TWO examples of each type of figurative language shown in this handout:
Next we spent some time listing characteristics of people in our families. We came up with a good list of descriptive words and phrases for each person, and then made a metaphor for each person.
Tonight students should write a metaphor poem, about their family. Here are two excellent examples:
By this time we barely had time to talk a bit about forces, friction, gravitation, and magnetism. This also meant we didn’t have time to get to our science homework (BLAH!), so that will be added on tomorrow!
so, tl;dr
Volume practice
Find 2 examples of each type of figurative language in this poem:
write a metaphor poem about your family:
And as always, read read read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
PS: students took home today an assumption of risk form. This is basically an “it’s ok for my child to ride the boat” permission slip from Carolina Ocean Studies, the company that hosts the first part of our field trip. If you could get it signed and back in quickly I would really appreciate it.