Tuesday, August 30, 2016

On this second day of the school year, the students began going to their special area classes.  Since this is considered to be Day 1 of the specials rotation, my class went to the media center.

Today is the day where Class Dojo is going to be used.  If you haven't already signed up for it, please do so since it allows you to get real time updates on your child's behavior (both positive and negative) as well as important messages.

We began the day after the announcements by going over the expectations and procedures of the classroom, hallways, cafeteria, restrooms, and recess.  This is something that I am going to be reinforcing over the next two weeks since I want my students to acclimate themselves to the routine.

In literacy, I re-read a book called A Bad Case of Stripes.  Students discussed what the overall message of the book is (being yourself) and I touched on author's purpose.  

Author's purpose can be generally broken down into:

1)  To inform
2)  To persuade
3)  To entertain

Of course, many texts have been written with more than one purpose in mind.

Afterwards, students were given time to read independently as well as listen to me read aloud from a book called When the Tripods Came.

In math, we began place value up to the millions place.  I also went over the procedures for the whole group portion (first 45 minutes) of the math block.  We begin with a brief warm-up that is discussed after being collected.  

I reviewed how we, along with most of the world, use the Base 10 numeration system.  Base ten means two things:

1)  You can use a maximum of ten different numbers (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) in each place
2)  Each place to the left is ten times the value of the number to the right.  In other words, this means powers of ten.

For independent work, students were divided into small groups and each group was given six, ten-sided dice to randomly generate a six digit number.  Then, each digit was examined for its value.  For example, a group rolls a 143768.  The 1 represents 100,000; the 4 represents 10,000; etc.

Afterwards the class did the exit ticket and then worked on IXL individually.

For science, we covered the scientific method.  We then did a brief experiment that answered the following question:  which balloon makes a louder noise when popped, a balloon filled to its limit or a partially filled balloon.

The first thing I did was blow up two balloons, one very full of air and another only partially inflated.  I walked around the room and showed the balloons to the class and allowed them to observe and think about it.

Afterwards, they made a hypothesis based on three possible outcomes:

1) The larger balloon will make a louder noise when popped.
2)  The smaller balloon will make a louder noise when                                                                   popped.
                                                     3)  There will be no difference in loudness

In order to determine which one, if any, is louder, some kind of measurement had to be used.  We discussed how important it is in a scientific experiment about consistency since the results won't be meaningful otherwise.  What I used was my smart phone with a decibel meter app.  Both balloons were popped at the exact (or as close as possible) same distance from the phone and the results were recorded:

---

The larger balloon measured 79 decibels while the smaller one popped at 73 db.  The students then wrote on whether or not their hypothesis was correct.