Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Today we entered the month of November and a brief interlude before the holiday season begins.  This is the beginning of a four day week and next week will have only three instructional days (Tuesday, Election Day, is a teacher workday and Friday is Veterans' Day).  Despite that, I am still determined to maximize instructional time and focus on student learning.

This is also the first day of the second quarter.  Normally I would mention how the beginning of the new quarter is the opportunity to make better choices, especially in terms of grades.  However, this year is different.  This is a new opportunity to keep up the great work!

In literacy, we did some Caesar's English in preparation for Friday's quiz.  A significant amount of time was spent on JA Biztown.

Students were assigned their jobs and met together.  The CEO and CFO of each mock company were in charge of the tasks that had to be completed.  I will giving students plenty of class time to get things done to make sure all of us are ready for the field trip.

Also, tomorrow students will vote to elect the Mayor of JA Biztown.

The reason for this blog being so late in today's entry is that CMS experienced a district wide internet outage.  When I went to a workshop this evening at Pinewood Elementary off Seneca place, it was still down even at 7:00 pm.  Thus, I had to wait until I got home.

In math, we went over multiplication using the lattice method.  Tomorrow I will review the lattice method and introduce area modeling.  This approach uses expanded form to multiply.

In science, the students were introduced to rocks and the rock cycle by watching a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode.