As you can see, the McMurray family enjoyed a weekend getaway to Sacramento for Labor Day. My wife's family lives up there, and it was just fun to stay at a hotel and go swimming and spend time together. We visited Gold Rush Days in Old Town Sacramento, which included a tour of the California Military Museum and the Historic Railroad Museum. On our way home, we visited the Jelly Belly Factory. We all had a great time out!
We kicked things off as usual with warm-ups this morning. Instead of going over each set of warm-ups today, we discussed a question that posed a challenge for a student having to do with math and finding common denominators.
I introduced students to the September Packet which is an assortment of activities for early finishers to work on after warm-ups and possibly other classwork. Each month I'll have an early-finishers packet for everyone.
Afterward, we did the Pledge of Allegiance and settled in for our math lesson on adding and subtracting whole numbers. We reviewed our most recent lessons on finding a range of estimates and estimating sums and differences, and the class then practiced adding and subtracting whole numbers. We focused on regrouping and checking for accuracy by using the opposite operation to check the answer.
Once completed, I had the students take a break by looking through their September Packet and finding an activity to work on.
Around 9:45 we began our grade-level math Inventory Test. This took us right up to recess.
After recess, I brought the students back to class and opened up the read aloud book I started on Friday, Al Capone Does My Shirts and read the next chapter, "Trick Monkey." We're all enjoying the new discoveries the main character Moose is making on Alcatraz island with his sister, Natalie, back in January of 1935.
Several students needed more time to finish the 60-problem Inventory Test, so we resumed work on the assignment until nearly lunch (12:30pm).
After lunch, a few remaining students worked on the last handful of problems on the Inventory Test while the rest of the class read from their personal chapter books. I updated the reading list of books everyone has chosen for themselves.
We finally wrapped up the Inventory Test for the entire class around 1:30pm at which point we turned our attention to writing. The form of writing we're focusing on in Lesson 1 is character description and the trait is voice. I shared a couple of examples of ordinary sentences: "Gabrial is confused." and "Naomi was excited about the game." Many students volunteered more unique ways of adding their voice to make these examples into extraordinarily detailed sentences. Believe me, the quality and the detail of the examples shared around the classroom was impressive.
To close the introduction to this week's writing assignment, the class is going to pick either sentence and build a story around it with other characters, a setting, conflict, plot events, and a resolution. That will continue tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I introduced class jobs which are now posted by the door to the classroom. There are 10 jobs for the next 10 days, and then the next 1/3 of the class will take over, and we'll rotate jobs this way throughout the year. Additionally, students recorded their homework assignments in their binder reminders and prepared to go to choir.
Mrs. Steidell taught the students proper breathing techniques and led them through some vocal warm-ups before introducing our first song. The kids had a good time with choir this afternoon, and at 2:50pm we were ready for dismissal.
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