Monday, October 1

It's October 1, and the heat is on!  I told kids that we have had a slow start as far as homework is concerned and that things would start to pick up.  In reality, however, if students work hard and use their class time wisely AND spend at least an hour on homework on most nights, they should find no difficulty getting work done on time and well. We've had a handful of students who are struggling to keep up with their homework, but most of them have admitted that they haven't really spent too much time outside of class doing homework.  Some even admitted that they haven't always used class time well.  Today we really emphasized the important of utilizing the time given.

Grammar:  The group that was in art last week played a Jeopardy review game as a culmination of the simple and compound sentence focuses.  Now we head into a a couple months of silent sustained reading.  We will still continue to have grammar mini-lessons at the beginning of class, but students will have 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time.  Three times weekly, they will be expected to write a response to their reading, based on various reading strategies.  It is imperative that students bring their novels to grammar class.  Mr. Sprain and I both agree that kids can leave their novels in our classroom if they are afraid of forgetting it.

Math:  Students learned today about expressing equations as inequalities.  For homework: Finish 2.3 and be prepared to discuss it tomorrow, ACE questions p. 35 #6, p. 38 #24 & 25, and then they should begin a review sheet that I gave them.  This is not a graded assignment, but it will help guide them to knowing what areas of this unit to ask questions and study before taking the test on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Language Arts: For Language Arts, the biggest project the students need to work on right now is writing a rough draft of their spooky story.  The due date right now for this is Wednesday by the end of class.  However, I told students that if they work hard all week, I might extend this to the beginning of class on Monday so that they can have the weekend to put the finishing touches on it.  Otherwise, students also need to work on Journal Entry #4.  I have decided that Journal Entry #4 will be the last journal entry for a while since the students will be practicing good paragraph writing in their spooky stories and, eventually, their persuasive business letters (where we are headed next week).  

Social Studies:  We are tying up the loose ends of the Russia unit with a map test and content test on Wednesday.  Our City Planning project is being kicked off with a walking field trip this Thursday, and we will do some preliminary planning with that this week.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.