This week we are going to start learning more about biographies. I’m going to ask all students to find or bring a biography about someone they are interested in knowing more about. This book can be about anybody, but later on I will be limiting the selection list. I will be reading portions of some biographies for students to get an idea of the genre. Eventually, students will write a book review, a short essay, and near the end of our genre study, a speech about a person.
Julia and Lewis parent (and Holistic Heath Practicioner by profession) Amy Lusson worked with the class in the garden last week and talked about different herbs that grow in the Lewis garden. The high point was getting to sample tea made from some common herbs. Our last session for this part of the year is this week. We have our second sessions starting in mid-May.
We started up with Reed College Biology last week. We lost “Reed College Emma” and gained “Reed College Haley.” Ben (from Reed) joins us again. We are studying about wetlands ecology.
Our reading story this week is about escape artist Harry Houdini. All of this week’s spelling words are contractions. See the post on the blog for information on the spelling and vocabulary words. By the way, I was impressed with the results of last week’s spelling test based on possessives. I thought it was one of the more difficult tests we’ve taken and we had a lot of pretty high scores on it.
In math, area and perimeter are going to be our focus for a while. I really want the class to be able to figure out the perimeter (the distance around an object) and area (the space inside a figure) and to “understand that a given area of a rectangle can result in different perimeters and that a given perimeter of a rectangle can result in different areas.”
That last section was taken from the report card, which are coming out on Friday. I hope to conference with individual students about the report cards before they are handed out. Please call or write if you have any questions about anything. There shouldn’t be any big surprises.
Homework is the math and spelling packets and the reading log.
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This entry was posted on February 5, 2012 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.