This week is going to be a bit shorter than usual because Staff Development Day is on Friday and students will not attend school. With that in mind, we got off to a quick start this week with Warm-ups for 10 minutes (hopefully most answered as many of today's 20 questions as possible) before we took our first trip to the School Library where we visited with the librarian, Mrs. Bremer.
One of the first things the class did after Mrs. Bremer reviewed her library rules was make a shelf marker. Supplies were provided for the class to design and color their own shelf marker while Mrs. Bremer took pictures of the students for a special school project she's completing.
Around 8:50am we exited the library and headed out to meet Mrs. Pane for PE. The students ran the half-mile today. I picked up the class at 9:40am and for the third straight time, they greeted me with an AWESOME ticket! I am very proud of the outstanding effort the class has made by demonstrating good behavior. For their efforts, we had a special drawing in class for this week's reward. This Thursday at lunch, it will be a special game of Scrabble on the iPad with yours truly. We're up to a 3-player game at this point after this morning's drawing.
The class returned to the library to check out books, and when we returned to class at 10:10am, we dove straight into the final lesson in Chapter 2 on decimals. Tomorrow, of course, is the chapter test. So for homework tonight, the class will review decimals in the textbook to prepare.
Following recess I read the next chapter in Gennifer Choldenko's Al Capone Does My Shirts. It was Moose Flanagan's first day of school off the island, and Piper continues to amaze and annoy him. We'll have to see if Moose will do her bidding or stand up to Piper, all the while his family deals with the recent departure of his sister, Natalie, to a special school that they're hoping will be the answer to her problems.
We then turned out attention to this week's story in our theme of "Finding a Way" by going into Chang and the Bamboo Flute. I read aloud a short narrative nonfiction piece entitled, "The Deaf Musicians." It focused on four friends and jazz musicians (piano, clarinet, bass, singer) who met on the New York City subway and performed concerts using sign language. The class discussed how they found a way to use their talents and many students wanted to share out the various sign language words and letters they knew. Nicole signed the entire alphabet and Jacoby taught us all how to sign, "Hello, my name is ..."
We previewed the robust vocabulary for Chang and discussed the genre of historical fiction. It was then time for this week's spelling pre-test on variant vowels and vowel dipthongs. It was important to discuss the difference between last week's digraphs and this week's ("funny word" as some called it) dipthongs.
Once the spelling test was through, we were closing in on lunch. Our class signed up to help as Recycling Monitors for the school, and so the six students who signed up for Monday headed off ahead of the class to lunch to stand by their assigned bins to make sure students at the cafeteria were properly disposing of their lunch items.
Back in class after lunch recess, the air-conditioning was a welcome relief to the hot outdoors. The class settled in for silent reading, while at the same time, pre-assigned volunteers came to the white board to fill in the Cultural Regions chart I had organized before lunch. Several volunteers filled out information in columns about geography, climate, tools and utensils, clothing, and more, while the class was reading silently and I was completing our entry-level fluency testing.
After 30 minutes or so, I reviewed the now-completed chart and we prepared for tomorrow's lesson quiz on American Indian cultural regions. This is also the chart which students will use to build mobiles with their Clock Partners on the different cultural regions.
We had time enough to record homework assignments and then clean up the classroom before the 2:50pm dismissal. It was a busy yet productive day of school!
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