My apologies

Hello,


Sorry about no blog yesterday.  I had a meeting after Homework Club that went past 6:30 and then I had to run off to dinner. 


We have started a mini unit on astronomy.  Yesterday we tackled the Big Bang Theory.  Today we talked about our solar system and the relative size of the planets.  We hung our 3 foot sun on one end of the school and then walked 125 feet to where a 3 millimeter (diameter) Mercury would reside in our scale model.  A 7.9 mm Venus (over another 100 ft away) and a 8.3 mm Earth (another 90 ft away) came next.  (Please excuse my jumping from one type of measurement to another, and all of my parenthesis.)  After placing a 4 mm Mars 170 feet further down the hall, we had to visualize where the outer planets would be orbiting.  Jupiter would have been off school property.  Neptune would have been 3km away.  Pretty crazy stuff.  I think the kids understood the point of the lesson:  There is an awful lot of empty space in space. 


The book Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. plays a major role in one of our class reads and was just mentioned in our class read aloud.  I brought in my Illustrated Classic of the story (comic book version.)  We got through half of it, projecting the illustrations on the white board.  Now they should understand all of the references to the story that they are seeing in these other books.  We'll finish tomorrow.


Band concert tomorrow.  My policy is not to let kids call home if they forget homework or instruments.  I'll probably allow the call on a concert night, but I hope they have learned to remember those things that are important to them.


No spelling test this week.  I forgot to give the old tests back on Tuesday, so we'll get back at it next week. 


It is late again.  I need to go.


Thanks,


Steve