Wednesday, October 2

Oh boy! Each student began the day with 3 tickets. If they needed any reminders for behavior and/or talking, they had to give me a ticket. Whatever tickets they had left at the end of the day went into a lottery and I pulled out a winner. Congrats Blaine! This was mostly effective. However, I did find that I still gave warnings without taking tickets so I'll need to be better at taking tickets tomorrow. Hopefully, this will curb our chatty behavior and loud transitions! There may still be Behavior Reflection sheets coming home, I'm still passing out warm fuzzies and the class earned another piece for Mr. Potato Head from the report I got from the substitute.
In Science, we sorted situations by if they described Weathering, Erosion or Deposition. There was some debate on some of the situations so we will research and decide at a later date. In Math, we focused on factors, prime numbers and composite numbers through working with cubes to make arrays and learning a little about cicadas. Ask your child what cicadas have to do with math... After recess, we read the chapter on Science Fiction from Nightmare at the Book Fair. This chapter had aliens and UFOs! One of my favorite chapters is next, Humor, with Captain Obvious and the Exaggerator!! The kids saw my excitement and talked me into reading a little from it and it was the best read ever! (Just kidding but that is an example of what the Exaggerator might say.) In Reader's Workshop, we read silently and independently, sketched characters from our independent reads and completed a Mad Lib that was turned in to be assessed. I think most understand and remember parts of speech which will be helpful moving in to relative pronouns... ugh... who, whom, whose, which and that. In Writer's Workshop, we gathered ideas for the beginning, middle and end of our personal narratives. Tomorrow, we'll take our graphic organizers and begin writing personal narratives. We finished our day by sorting our Word Study words. This week, our words have a vCe pattern where the silent e at the end of the words makes the vowel a long vowel sound.

Thank you for the added interest in reading the blog. I hope it has helped you to get a look into our day and guide better conversation with your children. Also, the kids really like giving me the secret message each morning! For tomorrow, have your child greet me with "hello" or "good morning" from another language.