Hello, families--
Next Thursday, on September 22, Eric Bird from Digital Wish will begin his work with fifth and sixth grade students and their newly assigned Dell Latitude 2120 rugged-ized netbooks. We're excited and extremely fortunate to to be working with Eric as we learn about the latest Web 2.0 technology. The Digital Wish program will help prepare our students for an increasingly technological future--in a manner that is both relevant and meaningful to them. I suspect that, as the kinks continue to be worked out, the netbooks will begin finding their way to your homes in early October. I hope you'll be able take a few minutes from time to time so that your children can show you what they (and their teachers!) are learning!
Today's assignments:
Grade 6
- Language Arts--we completed Spelling inventories today, and began the pre-work for writing our personal mission statements. We also completed the first three interconnected Grammar lessons in our Spelling/DOL packets.
- Spelling--we discussed and completed "Day 3." (We do one page a day, Monday through Thursday, with the test on Friday.)
- Social Studies--we reviewed Cardinal and Ordinal (intermediate) directions, and worked on a direction-finding activity. If it wasn't completed in class, it has become homework. This assignment is due on Friday; however, some students have already figured out that, if you have soccer practice on Thursday evening, you'd do well to complete this assignment sooner rather than later. . .
- Reading is ALWAYS at least 20 minutes a night.
- Also, we did an eye-opening exercise today. . . As you may recall, on the first day of school I required that students choose an independent book to read. This book should be traveling home and back each day and is to be the basis of their first book project. As I told them early on, I'll only require one book this month since we're still settling in. The date for the in-class book project was then set for the 20th. WELL, today I had everyone fill in a form listing the name of their book, the number of pages in the book, how much they've read so far, how much is left to read. . . Since they have only 6 days until the 20th, I then had them calculate how many pages per night they would need to read in order to be done on time. For some, this was a major wake-up call! (Now, there's a lesson learned, for you!) Check with your child to see how they're doing. . .
Grade 5
- No Social Studies today.
- Language Arts--Sentence structure is problematic, so for class today, we discussed how to develop a simple sentence into a richly developed one. Then, I cut apart a series of increasingly complicated sentences into individual words and assigned on word to each student in a group. Without talking, they were supposed to communicate which word came first, which came second, etc. until they created a grammatically correct sentence. They all did very well! I finished class time by reading one of my favorite picture books (known for its rich sentence development) aloud to them.
Tomorrow will be cooler and perhaps rainy, but, ohhh, the weekend looks like another good one!
I hope your evening is a restful one.
R/
Teri
