HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
I missed all of your little people, and I was worried that after being gone for SIXTEEN days we'd have to start back at square one...but not your kids...we jumped right back into it and they have been AWESOME!
LANGUAGE ARTS
Just this week...in four days...they wrote multi-paragraph narrative essays...and they are incredible! I have about 6 more kids that need a conference with me for revision and then we'll be done. The kids had a choice to type their first draft or write it...most kids chose word processing, so their revisions were a little easier, but the kids who chose to write did a fantastic job...and THEN typed!! Our long, hard work on paragraphs has paid off!! This week we also have been continuing our biography unit...I was excited for today because the kids were going to be picking their "important person" that they will eventually represent in our Wax Museum. We will be starting this process on Monday. This past week, in order to prepare them for this next writing assignment, we read two different biographies...Louis Braille and Thomas Edison...they identified the main ideas, necessary supporting details, and then organized all of their notes on a graphic organizer. As a small group, we wrote the biography in the first person (just as they will do) about their important people. I believe they are ready...but ready or not, we start Monday!
MATH
This week in Math we had one of our best math lessons EVER! We used the first day back to review lines, measuring angles, geometry vocabulary, etc. While we were reviewing we drew triangles with particular angle measurements...and discovered that triangles' three angles always add up to 180 degrees! The next day I asked the kids to do an investigation about how to find the area of a triangle. They all cut out their triangles and began investigating....I wish you could have been here...they had rulers, grid paper, protractors, they were talking, thinking...it was energizing...and guess what?!?! They flippin' figured it out! Some kids realized that if you put that triangle on a rectangle, it was 1/2 and they knew how to find the area of a rectangle. SO they found the area of the rectangle and then divided by 2! Some kids traced it on grid paper and counted squares, and one child figured that if you folded the two corners into the triangle, it created a rectangle, he found the area of that rectangle and multiplied by two! It was such an "ah-ha" moment for all of them. I asked them why they thought I chose to teach the area of a triangle like this, and one of the kids said, "So we could figure it out ourselves..." YUP...and they sure did. We will finish up this quarter working on line plots, line graphs, and decimals.
SOCIAL STUDIES
We finished up the Social Studies unit on Coming to America this week...we did a Readers Theater called "First Stop, Ellis Island" and then performed it for Mrs. Humerick and Mr. Clutz's classes...it was really a great play...it focused on the hardships of immigrants in the early 1900's and taught the kids about how quotas were put into place around 1922...and what that meant for people as they got off the boats. I was very proud of the oral communication skills the kids used to perform this play...they are improving daily in their self confidence and in their ability to speak with that confidence (and a couple of them already had plenty :-).) I am so looking forward to you seeing them in a performance role later this winter.
HAVE A GOOD LONG WEEKEND
Well...I am at school as we speak (because there is NOTHING wrong with the roads)...catching up and writing this post. But I wish the room was full of the chatter of some of the greatest kids I've ever taught...but since they're not here, I'll turn up my music and get some work done. Enjoy your early weekend...and as always, email me with questions or concerns.
