March 17, 2011

I am back now! Happy to see the kids but missing Disneyland and the California weather....ahhh, bitter sweet.

What we did today:

AM/PM: We went to the library and started doing research on our Non Fiction books. I can tell these are going to be awesome!

Checked our math homework.
This is the new policy that we all agreed on in class: All homework is due the next day. If you did not do your homework, you will get a zero. The only exception is if you were sick in some way that you were not able to do it off the computer. If you did your homework but forgot it, I will not except it unless they have a parent note. However, even then, I will take off 1 point for being late and 1 point for each day that is late. After the 3rd day, I will not except it at all. NO REDOs. I did redo's in the past, but I think that students were getting too comfortable with doing things later and it took a lot of my time to grade those individually.

Math: We had a lot of students missing today so we watched a Bill Nye video on measurement and took an extra credit quiz. If you weren't there, don't worry, it won't count against you.

Read from "Chains," and worked on our leprechauns and shamrocks.

Grammar: We worked on contractions. We reviewed helping verbs and how contractions negate the main verb. For example, I can't go to the game today. "can't" is not part of the main verb "go" but it is a helping verb that is contracted to negate "go."
Then, we practiced making contractions in sentence. There is homework on this.

We also had a discussion on how we can improve our behavior in class. I told the students that I know that they want to do good but they have to train themselves to behave in the way they should. Then, they came up with a great idea. We are going to make a Colored Card Chart to keep track of our behavior in class. We are going to make a card chart where all students will have their name and will have 3 colored cards in their pocket. Green means they are doing great in class by listening and doing their work. Yellow means they got a warning and they need to pay attention to the way they are acting. Red means that they are not doing so good. If they get red then they have to stay in for half of the recess. If they do something that makes them turn their color again, they get black. This means that they have to stay in for the entire recess and they get a call home.

HW:
worksheet on contractions