A Two Special Day

Hello,

Most of the class brought in sneakers for gym today.  Hopefully we'll have 100% of the kids with sneakers for next Wednesday.  Ms. D'Agostino is a great physical education teacher with a real knack for introducing games and activities that coincide with many of the real world lessons that we are teaching in our regular classrooms. 

We will usually only have one special on Wednesday's, but we were treated to an extra library session by Mrs. Sairio this afternoon.  Our regular library day will be Monday.  (I sent a class schedule home with your child tonight.)  In fourth grade we only get our library special once every two weeks, so today's session saved us from a much longer wait before our first library class. 

We had some great news stories reported on this morning.  It was an impressive array of topics.  Interestingly enough, not one was on the Democratic National Convention.  I'm kidding.  Hopefully they will get a little more interested in the election, however, as they learn more about government. 

I appreciate the help at home.  Many of you signed the assignment books and I would love if you would keep doing that.  It is also a good spot to jot down a quick message to me, if you would like.  Unfortunately, your homework is not over.  A health update form was mistakenly omitted from your packet last night.  Please get that back to me when you can. 

We spent some time on place value this morning.  We played with cubes, rods and flats.  These are plastic blocks used to represent numbers.  (One cubic cm represents one.)  We did some counting by ones, tens, hundreds and thousands with a focus on counting correctly without saying the word "and" in the middle of a number.  When saying a number, the word and means that the rest of the number will be less than one (as in three and one quarter).   We put together a visual representation of these numbers using the blocks.  We also built a giant cube out of PVC pipes to represent one million.  We went outside with tape measures to visualize even higher numbers.  My favorite line of the day came during the time outside when I heard someone say, "You've got to blog about this!"

The two homework pieces tonight should be relatively fun.  One is easy: put two different items in a small bag that represent things that are important to you.  Tomorrow we will take a look at the bags and try to guess what the items represent and who brought them in.  The other homework is a challenge to write a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.  If they can't do it, then they should be able to get close.  A couple kids accomplished the feat in class, so their challenge is to use as few total letters in their sentence as possible, yet still have all 26.

No specials tomorrow, so we should get into some real nitty-gritty.  Good stuff.

Have a great night and thanks for reading,

Mr. Shea