Week 8

Hi!  We had another fun week. 

Using puppets to review behavior rules

Music teacher as the star of the week

What students did in P.E.  (Halloween box maze)

Making spider webs

making spider webs

making spider webs

Spider students made

ghosts students made for art

Funny Sayings from Kids: I know there were a few good ones, but I forgot to jot them down, and now I can’t remember them.  The only thing I remember is that the first thing said to me at the beginning of the week was, “Mr. Smith, it was so funny in church when Baby Charlie threw up all over your church clothes.”. . .and to think that I thought no one had noticed!

Special Activities: We had several special activities this week.  We reviewed fire safety in honor of fire prevention month.  My wife came in to teach an art lesson.  Briar Harris, the education coordinator from the Uinta County Conservation District, came to teach the class about spiders.  She did an activity where students made scientifically accurate spiders and webs out of spaghetti and olives.  We also had other great volunteers, including help with beginning a Christmas program for our class to perform.      

Academics: This week in math we continued practicing doubles.  We also did more to introduce subtraction and practice ordering numbers.  A big focus was ordering numbers 1 through 20, along with ordering the numbers 1 through 10 in reverse (i.e. counting backwards).  One highlight of writing this week was making Halloween books out of a folded sheet of paper.  Students had very clever stories, and we practiced the skills of spacing words, capitalization, and complete sentences. Our reading and spelling focus was the fizzle rule, where a word with a short vowel sound ending in f, l, s, or z has two of that letter. (pill, off, etc.).  In social studies, we learned the social skill of respecting the space of others.  In science, we learned about spiders from our special guest, as noted above.  We also did an experiment with rolling up paper.  We showed that you can easily crush one piece of rolled paper, but several pieces of rolled paper (especially if rolled tightly) cannot be crushed with ordinary human force.  Another fun experiment was leaving a baby carrot out in the open air.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t go moldy.  Instead it dries up in an interesting fashion.