Week 3! August 31-September 4

A few pictures from the week:

During Drama this week we worked up to a couple of performances of a reader's theater I had adapted from the book, If You Give a Cat a Cookie. The first picture is from our performance for Mrs. J and Ms. Neilson.

On Friday this week, our Character Lesson focused on being Trustworthy. Along with other discussions, we built a Trust Tower. Each student came up with three different ways to build trust with someone and wrote their ideas on a sticky note. We stuck them to blocks and used them to build up our tower which ended up 12 at the base and 12 high for 78 blocks tall. At the end of the lesson, I had a ball with just one simple thing on it that could break trust. I used lying, but we talked about other possibilities, and then I used the ball to break the tower, to show them just how fragile trust could be. This picture is of a couple of our classmates adding their ideas to the tower.

“Trust is like a vase... Hard to build, and if it gets broken,

though you can fix it, the vase will never be the same again.”

To add to our excitement of this next week, we have two new students joining our class on Tuesday! I met them both Friday afternoon. They should both add their own personality to make our class that much more fun. Our original number, before the year started was 27 students, but we had lost 3, so adding these two, we have a class total of 26 students now!

This week has a lot of fun activities in store. We have the usual things, of course. We'll read this weeks Basal story, Knots in My Yo-yo String. We'll continue on with our Words Their Way spelling list. This first week had a lot of success. The kids did well with their lists, and we've all moved forward. We're going to look further in Algebraic expression and study prime and composite number this week. In drama on Monday we're going to work with a poem book called Joyful Noise which is poetry for two voices. The kids will partner up and practive a poem which will them perform for the class. After that we will have some fun acting out the dramatics in the song Don Gato.

There are a few special occasions going on this week. Wednesday is the special day of the YEAR! It's September 9, which is numeric form is 9-9-09. So we're going to celebrate the number 9 by writing a 9 poem, and drawing a nine picture, and then giving those pictures to some 9 year olds. If all goes well, we also perform a nine song for them.

Then, of course, for those of us who are old enough to remember, Friday is 9-11. I am going to do a couple of lesson this week using the events of 9-11 to teach them the difference between a hero and a celebrity.

All in all, it should be a fun filled week with lots of learning!

"The Holy Grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it." -Banksy