Tuesday, 1/24/17

We had a sunny, beautiful day today!  Our class blazed through their new spelling lists, vocabulary lessons, and handwriting time.  The Chicken group reviewed different ways to add suffixes to the ends of words:  tiny + est = tiniest, smoke + ing = smoking, etc.  They really did a great job remembering the different rules and when to apply them.  We reviewed to, too, and two before diving into the book, "Stage Fright on a Summer Night".  At home, they read the first chapter at home.  In class, we discussed what they read, and they took turns reading the next two chapters.  This book is set in London in the year 1600.  We will be focusing on what life was like in England at that time. The Guinea group continued to work their way through the MacBeth book in the Shakespeare for Kids series.  They begged me to read past what I had planned for today, and we made it all the way to Banquo's ghost's appearance at the banquet table!

 These kids absolutely loved their history reading about Isabelle and Ferdinand!  They broke up into groups and reenacted what they remembered from the story... which was a lot!  After a review of how Spain was united, the students worked on a map activity to help them gain a better understanding of the geography from the story.  

In grammar, the Cow group began with the students breaking into pairs to study their grammar cards.  Next, they learned a new part of speech: prepositions!  They will be working on memorizing the preposition list soon, but for now, they are just working on understanding the role prepositions play in the sentence and how to identify them.  We put glue sticks under the table, on the table, above the table, and had all sorts of visuals to help the lesson "stick"!  After our lesson, the students headed outdoors to continue filming their Conjunction Junction remake video.  We're almost done shooting!

Last week, the Horse group learned about prepositions, prepositional phrases, and objects of the preposition.  Today, they learned how conjunctions can join words or groups of words in a sentence.  They diagrammed sentences with multiple subjects and multiple direct objects in class.  They will be working much more with this over the next couple of weeks.  

In writing class, the kids were so very excited to share their stories!  Last week, each class was told that they were the crew of a large spaceship.  The students had to each come up with their job title on the spaceship, writing at least a paragraph to explain their role on the team.  As they shared these in class, Mr. Jim had the students record each of their classmates' jobs.  The classes agreed on names for their spaceships, and their crews were all set!  At home Friday and Monday, the classes had to take their list of crew-members and write a story about their spaceship's adventure!  Because their classmates were performing set jobs on the ship, these kids ate it UP!  

After math study, the students learned about elements, compounds, and mixtures.  After our lesson, the class created a fruit salad to represent a mixture and a smoothie to represent a compound. Yum!