Hello,
Picture day tomorrow! Our class time isn't until 2:00 though, so realize that a perfect hairdo or well pressed shirt, may not be so nice after a recess, lunch and learning.
No homework club on Thursday for this week or next. Meetings have been scheduled for both days. I apologize for any inconvenience. I know that the kids aren't going to be happy. I knew about the 22nd, but the meeting on the 15th was just announced today. I can't help the late notice on that one.
We watched a video today. It was part of National Geographic's three part series titled Guns, Germs and Steel. The videos are based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name. Professor Diamond narrates the series which attempts to answer the question of why were the European explorers able to dominate and obliterate the American natives during the Age of Exploration?
The portion of the series that I showed the class focused on Spain's annihilation of the Incas despite being vastly outnumbered. Diamond is able to show how guns (superior weapons), germs (susceptibility to disease), and steel (advanced technology), made the outcomes inevitable. He also does a good job to show how geography played a major role in the differences in the inhabitants of these continents. Technology, ideas and diseases are much more easily spread across continents that lay along similar latitudes. These things did not spread very well along the north to south lines that connect the Americas. Good video, great book.
We got into multiple digit division in math. Lots of zeroes in the numbers should make it easy. We want them to see that 420 divided by 30 is the same as 42 divided by 3. They did well with this in class. Homework could be another story.
The class finished acting out idioms this morning. Some groups acted idioms out in literal ways after using them in their traditional figurative forms. Pretty funny stuff.
Already Wednesday tomorrow. Time flies when you're having fun.
Thanks,
Mr. Shea
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