Wednesday

It is always so nice when I pick up the kids from specials and I hear from the teacher, "They were good today - did all their work!"  What a great way to start my day!

• 1st - Science with Ms. Galan.
• 2nd - We started by collecting homework and updating our ClassDojo account.  If you notice your child is getting multiple "No Homework"... they get one negative for each homework they don't do.  After that we did a different type of "ELA Test Prep" by  having them read a text all alone and answer the six questions all alone.  I want to see if my teaching is reaching... see if they are getting it!  Then we moved into our whole class novel "The BFG" and read the next two chapters "Snozzcumbers" and "The Bloodbottler Giant".  We focused on descriptions today as we read.  The author does a very good job at describing things with such great imagery and detail.  He also has used a lot of "made up" words so we spent a lot of time practicing the skill of using context clues to figure out what the made up words really mean.   It is fun!
• 3rd - ReadyGen lesson 3b.4.   We started by looking at a poem in our text collection that describes what an eruption was like.  Our goal was to look at the poem and see if the text we are reading "Anatomy of a Volcano" had the same description of volcano eruptions.   We read pages 20-27 which focused mainly on the characteristics of volcanic eruptions and the five different types of volcanoes.  Speaking of mainly - our focus today was on MAIN IDEA!  The kids have to take the main idea just mentioned and find supporting details from pages 20-23 to prove that this is, in fact, the main idea!
• 4th/5th - GoMath 8.3 and 8.4 - We went over the homework and then spent time really going over how to multiply a whole number and a fraction.   We went over the steps (turn the whole number into a fraction by putting it over 1)... then you multiply the numerators and then you multiply the denominators.  If the product is an improper fraction, then you have to convert it into a mixed number by dividing the numerator by the denominator.  I wanted to make sure that they really understood the steps and the process because we added a new wrinkle to the process today.  What if you had to multiply a whole number (integer) by a mixed number... what do you do then...  
• first you make the whole number a fraction by placing it over 1
• then you convert your mixed number into an improper fraction by multiplying the denominator by the whole number and add the numerator to get the new numerator, keep the same denominator.
• now you can multiply numerators and then denominators
• if the product is an improper fraction, convert it back to a mixed number by dividing the numerator by the denominator.  
• We worked on the process and different students were able to work problems for the class.  Students who did not have a firm grasp on the process were asked to have a chat and chew lunch - come back upstairs and work while we eat.
• 6th - Lunch (about 8 kids came upstairs to work and eat)
• 7th - Science - HIV Lesson #2 - What is HIV

Homework:

• Reading - Use the Web A Graphic Organizer to find the main idea of pages 20-23.  The main idea goes in the center, the spokes get filled with "PARAPHRASED" information from each section that supports the main idea.
• Math - GoMath Practice 8.4
• Math - Salamander Math Multiplying Fractions Sheet 1