After resting over the three-day weekend, the class came back to school. Since it was raining off and on outside the students came inside immediately instead of waiting outside until the bell rang. Some of the early arrivals went right to work finishing up their Martin Luther King, Jr. Dream projects while others went online to play at www.freerice.com to earn food for the hungry. Either way, everyone did a great job working quietly. When the bell rang, I put up the morning announcement on the LCD projector and the students quietly went to work on their D.O.L. (Daily Oral Language) and writing their petitions for the week. A few minutes later the 8th graders came on over the loud speaker to do the pledge and announcements for the day. It was really hard to hear them because the speaker had a lot of static. Thankfully we know the pledge by heart and said a prayer silently to ourselves. When announcements were finished we corrected our D.O.L. together and began Religion. The students did a magnificent job of writing special intentions for their loved ones as well as the needy around the world.
Once our morning work was finished we dove straight into spelling. We have twenty contractions this week! The kids did a great job determining where to put the apostrophes in each word. We were shocked to hear that during a recent study, kids were asked to spell four specific contractions 1,191 times. The results show that they actually misspelled them 92% of the time due to misplaced apostrophes!!! We discussed how to know where the apostrophes go when we “squish” two words into one. When spelling was completed, we moved onto our story for the week, “William Shakespeare and the Globe”. The students seemed to like the snappy music that went with the biography and learned a great deal about William Shakespeare's life. We also discussed proverbs, which offer us advice through their sayings. We talked about some common proverbs the students have heard. Our favorite is “Don’t count your chickens until they're hatched.”
Finally, we were ready for a break. The students went outside, which had cleared up for them and they were able to work off some built up energy. At 10:40am, I met them and brought them back into meet some new classmates. I proudly introduced Cisco, the koala bear, and Sidney, the panda bear. Cisco and Sidney are Webkinz. The students can actually log on to the Webkinz website (with parent’s permission of course) and take educational quizzes to earn money and buy their virtual pet things. Cisco and Sidney sit back in the library and keep our other two class pets, Cottonball and Brownie (our mice) company. We are very excited about the new addition of our two new virtual pets. When I was finished introducing the new pets to the class, we discussed the rubric for our Coat of Arms that everyone is working on. Two of our classmates already completed theirs. They are both excellent examples for the rest of the class to get ideas off of.
When we finished discussing our new pets and the Coat of Arms project, we began working on our math lesson. Today was multiplying fractions. I heard a lot of “Wow, this is easy” and “No problem” coming from the students. After doing examples together as a class, we watched an online tutorial of another teacher teaching the same lesson. This reinforced what I just taught them and allowed everyone to hear another teacher’s style of teaching. But we weren’t finished yet….next we watched Tim and Moby from Brainpop help us uncover the Mysteries of Life – in this case multiplying and also dividing fractions. I was so impressed with how many of the students understood multiplicative inverse even though they just learned it. Way to go class!!!!
Around noon we began working on our math homework for the night while some of the other students finished up their math test from last week. Soon the bell rang and the kids happily headed out for lunch. About 40 minutes later, I went outside to pick up the students. Perfect timing because it started to rain at that moment. We all went upstairs to Room 4 where the students waited for Mr. Howell to start music. I wasn’t in the room the whole time during music, but when I was I heard the kids working on learning the recorder. What fun!
Once music was done, we gathered together as a class again and discussed our new venture – JENSEN’S JOURNALISTS!!! I spoke about what would be required from each of them. They learned how what they wrote would be published for the entire world to see, so the students really know how important this assignment is. We looked at a couple examples and than everyone picked a date that they would be Jensen’s Journalists. I’m excited to see all of their hard work. Before we knew it, time was up and they wrote down their homework and packed up. We made sure everyone wiped down their desk with anti-bacterial wipes. The school has a lot of students out sick and I want to make sure none of them fall ill (including myself). Finally, the bell rang and everyone headed home.
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