Tuesday, Day Twenty-Six

Today was a lot of fun for the third grade. But before the fun started, the students were assigned the spelling words to be written 5 times each. For each student I created a table with six columns. The first column was just a word list. Part of doing them 5 times each is they must be in alphabetical order. We went through the alphabet and organized the words in the second column as they should be. Some of them were confused at first when the class had determined the first and second word, I circled the room while they wrote. A few of them had simply wrote word exactly were it was in the table. I can see how that can be confusing, I will work on a way to make that more clear for next week. Also, there was one worksheet we completed in their workbook. The students had to read a clue and see a word that rhymed with one of their spelling words. An example would be that "something worn on the wrist match______" and the spelling word is watch. After two of these the students caught on very well. The next exercise wanted them to choose the word from the larger word that contained their spelling word. An example of this would be 'knowing' where the spelling word is 'know'. After these we had a project. Keeping in the theme of their story, I gave each student a colored folder. They were to open it up and with colored glitter glue, create a symbol that represents them. I told them I wanted something that I could look at and know that was _______. They did very well with that. I think Thursday I will have the students present their symbol and tell how it represents them. The students had a lot of fun with this.

My little guy ended up not feeling well and left school early so we did not get to have our 2:00 meeting. I will try again tomorrow. These students always come into the classroom around 7:30 and they practice their cursive writing until it is class time. My guy could tell me what letter he was writing when I asked. I thought that was good.

My fourth grade did not do as well as I thought they would with the calendar. They could read the calendar and knew it was 3 weeks and 2 days between events. They knew there are 7 days in week, 365 days in a year, and 12 months in a year. Only one of them could say the months of the year. None could tell me how many days were in a given month. So I showed them the knuckle way telling how many days were in each month. My ST really enjoyed that and the students could tell me right off how many days. This also helped them remember the names of the months. We then took a quiz over the month names, the number of days in each, and the number of the month. Using the strategy I showed, they did very well. We did cover leap year and all of that also. Today was a very good day, even though they did not complete their personal schedules. This did upset me. I told them this is twice. They did not complete their own surveys (so we made up data) and now this. I also told them that I did not necessarily take a grade on this, because this was an assignment to strengthen what we have been discussing. I also informed them the next one will be for a grade and they will not be permitted to forget it at home or leave their instructions in the classroom; they will get a 0 if that is the case. I don't think I was too hard on them but these are things that will build on the lessons we are doing. We are coming up on relating multiplication and division, so I will have to create something for them to do. I have known teachers that when a student does not complete their assignments throughout the week, they would assign homework over the weekend. I don't want to take their weekend but I do expect it to be done.