Thursday, December 13, 2012

A Lesson in Perseverance!

I'm quite sure your children will fill you in when they get home, but today was kinda crazy!  This morning, around 11:00, we lost partial power in our classroom and no Internet access.  Then, this afternoon, we lost all of our power until 3:00ish.  Though it all, we pressed on with our learning tasks!!!

After going to art, we returned to the classroom and I passed back the children's writing journals in which I had provided feedback on the children's second paragraph of their tech tools project.  Then we reviewed the requirements and revisited my model paper.  Next, I modeled writing the third paragraph, about the present tech tool, for the class.

The students then finished making their cards for the cancer patients and attempted to gather more research for their tech tool writing pieces so they could make the improvements that my feedback indicated needed to be made.  Unfortunately, the power thing happened...

In math, we used our basic fact knowledge and square tiles to construct rectangles with a given area.  The students then drew pictures of the rectangles on graph paper and wrote an equation to match their drawing.  There is a worksheet for homework similar to their classwork.  We will have a quiz tomorrow.

Following lunch and outdoor recess the students returned to our classroom and worked on cards for the cancer patients...with all of the power issues, working on the writing piece was just too frustrating.  During this time I met with several reading groups.

Sharks:  We reviewed their answers to question 4 (homework from a few nights ago) and practiced retelling the story in preparation to write a summary next week.

Snakes:  We reviewed the -sh and-ch digraphs and reread pages 2-6, focusing on fluency.

Cheetahs:  We reviewed unknown words from chapter 1, retold the chapter and discussed the main character.

We ended the day with science (and power!).  We reviewed the meaning of mixture and reviewed which substance would be easiest to remove (rocks) and the observable property that made this so (the size of the rocks).  Then the children worked in groups to remove the rocks from their mixture.  They are now left with a mixture of sand and slat...stay tuned...we will separate these!

I will be out of the building tomorrow...so there will not be a blog post.  Students will focus on getting the 3 paragraphs of their writing pieces complete.  There will be a quiz in math that will not be scored and returned until Monday (sorry).  Also, they will read about the "wonders" of Africa and identify which "wonder" they think is the most spectacular.

Have a great weekend!

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