A castle is coming?

Hello,

The homework club worked on various projects including K'nex and Lego compositions, but the biggest group worked on a castle for our front entryway. We have two towers, plans for a styrofoam arch, and the makings of a giant drawbridge. This fits in perfectly with our fairy tales, fables, and legends unit.  I look forward to a finished product.  For want of a glue gun, it might be finished already.

Our planned mini unit on erosion and weathering started with a fizzle today. My slide projector blew a bulb, the replacement didn't quite fit, my slide carousel didn't fit the library projector, once I transferred my slides into the library carousel, the mechanism to advance the slides stopped working. It was a debacle. I've been using that word too much lately. Does anyone know where I should go to find a bulb for a 15 year old slide projector? A bit of a dinosaur, they probably stopped making the projectors as soon as I bought this one. I had planned on showing some of my pictures of many of our country's greatest national parks. Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, White Sands, Death Valley etc. are a result of some extraordinary erosion. We'll try again another day.

Our rounding estimation pretests went very well.  Most everyone bombed. "Why am I so happy about that?" I asked the class with a huge grin."

"Because we're all going to learn something," someone answered.

"That's right!" I replied. "Isn't that great?"

They weren't so excited about it.

We'll be getting into when and why we estimate as well as some estimation strategies. Rounding will be one of the strategies.

It was picture day today. Everyone looked nice. No one got too sweaty at lunch recess.  Teachers always hope for morning pictures. No such luck for us this year.

I forgot to write that our school counselors, Mrs. Farrand and Mrs. Rubio joined us last week. They introduced themselves to our new students, explained their jobs and what they will be doing with our classroom this year. We have four planned visits covering a variety of topics.

My eyes are getting heavy.  Homework club days are long day. Fun, but exhausting. I'm going to go eat and sleep.

Thanks for reading.

Mr. Shea