Monday, November 5, 2012

Homework:  15 minutes of Reading
Even if there is no other homework, quiet reading is something the students should do every night.

After a period of Gym and International Languages, we spent a period doing our weekly Community Circle exercise.  Each student is allwed to select 1 event from the weekend and use 2 minutes to talk and share it with the class.  After, students can ask questions.  This exercise is designed to get the students comfortable with talking about very specific things (who, what, when, where, how, why, and the sharing of thoughts and feelings). This happens at the start of each week.

We have finally got around to starting work on the sentence and art activity.  The students will be creating two sentences (one simple and one compound) using words and letters from the newspaper and then placing them on a "canvas" painted with water colours.  The canvas should have some type of relationship with the sentences created.

As a review, we watched this funny, sort of long, video from Youtube.  Yes, there are some good things on Youtube.

After watching this video, I selected to samples of simple sentences and how they could be changed into a compound sentence by using a conjunction.  Here are the images:

Example 1

Example 2

   
  

Here is another photo of the class working on this exercise.  This will be continued tomorrow:

  In preparation for Wednesday"s Math test, all of the Study Sheets were handed in today.  THEY WERE FOR HOMEWORK AND ASSIGNED ON THURSDAY NIGHT.  I will give  the study sheets back tomorrow and we will do one final exercise to help with review before the test.  Today we used one of the Promethean Board lessons as a review of the concepts of tenths, hundredths, and thousandths.  Here are a couple of images:

As much as possible, I try to have the students lead and correct others in the group.  When I need to explain a key concept, I will.  Also, I encourage the students to explain why something the way it is.  For example, if Kenny (pictured above) says that 3.14 is greater that 3.04, I will ask him why.  By explaining that there are "0 tenths" in the second number and "one tenths" in the first one, I will know he gets it.  If he makes a mistake, the students will be the one who will correct him.  Mrs. Machado helps in selecting students to participate so that everyone has an opportunity to talk and participate.