8-25-11

Happy Birthday, Abby!

I told the kids this morning...I woke up so excited to come to school today! Response from one of them...WHY? Why, because there are such great things coming their way. We are so busy in our little amount of time together each day. They really have to be on their toes to keep up. They are also learning that they need to be able to do a group activity and have fun, and then use self-control to calm down afterward ( a hard skill)!

Reading: Each day we do a word of the day called "Daily Vocab Review". We also read a short story and answer 4 comprehension questions (Daily reading review). If 90% of them get the questions right then we watch a short 2-3 minute video clip on whatever topic we read about. They seem to be really enjoying that. They are doing well! We've watched the clip all 3 days this week. We used the thesaurus today to find synonyms for our vocabulary words. This was finished in class.

HOMEWORK: Writing assignment- most important things

Science- We added, "scientists need to follow directions", to our list of skills scientists need to have. They followed step by step instructions to create a mystery substance. Let's just say some of them didn't follow the directions :) They then made their first lab notebook entry describing what they did and saw. They will leave all of their lab notes in the notebook and I will grade them once a quarter. They asked for the directions to the goo, so it is listed below.

Scientists have to follow directions:
1. Pour 1/2 cup of glue and 1/2 a cup of water together in the
bucket.
2. Add 2 drops of food coloring.
3. In a separate container mix 1 cup of water and 1 teaspoon
of borax powder.
4. Stir the glue mix with the borax mix.
5. Knead it until it becomes dry. The longer you knead the
less sticky it will become!
6. Stay in your group and play with your mystery substance
until further instructed!

REMEMBER: read 20 minutes and reading log are due every day with a parent signature!