The Daily Blog (Nov 30) - Dominic

Today started out with us doing the usual Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. We then shared with Mr. McMurray and the class about our weekends. Most people talked about their Thanksgiving but I didn't share in front of the class. Claire shared about how she completed an 8,000 word essay this month and received an announcement that she'd won the writing test for which she wrote the essay. That is very impressive!

The class then did nine math review problems on multiplying fractions, whole numbers, and mixed numbers, that were not that hard. Shortly after, the band people went off to band practice and the rest of worked on our Newspaper reports but some of us forgot - including me -to bring back our report papers. We have to make sure to bring those to school from now on so we can work on them during the day.

Once the band people returned to class, Mr. McMurray showed the student that were sick, and for all of our benefit, how to complete the book report packet. We couldn't wait to go out for our first morning recess and play for 20 minutes.

When we returned to class, Mr. McMurray read a couple of chapters from our new book, "Among the Hidden." This is a story about a place where families can only have two children or else they have no choice but to turn in their third child to the Population Police. Obviously, it is a fiction story. Anyhow, the main character, Luke, is being kept hidden, as he is a poor family's third child. Right now, he is feeling very lonely because he is trapped in the attic of his house, unable to really do anything. I wonder what will happen next?

After we discussed the book, Mr. McMurray introduced the vocabulary words we would hear in our new story, "La Bamba." These words are words you might hear when talking about being in a talent show. The words included

• volunteered
• embarrassed
• debut
• limelight
• duo

and a few other words. This was helpful because now when we read the story, we'll be able to better understand what these words mean. Mr. McMurray also showed us information about words with multiple meanings, and then discussed the background of the song, "La Bamba," which was made famous in the 1950s by singer, Ritchie Valens, who tragically died in a plane crash.

Like we do with every story we read, we spent a few minutes writing a prediction about what we thought would happen with the main character, Manuel, when he signed up to enter his school's talent show, and then read the first page or so of the story before lunch.

After lunch we had PE where we played hand soccer which most people think is okay but I would have rather played Straddle Hog. Our PE teacher gave us an "Awesome" report to our class, which made Mr. McMurray happy.


After PE, Mr. McMurray reviewed who turned in their California Healthy Kids survey permission slips, and those kids spent the rest of the day before dismissal answering those questions. The rest of the class was reading this week's Scholastic News and some were with M. McMurray doing the oral reading fluency test. And really that is how we pretty much finished our first day back to school after Thanksgiving break.