Day 6

My first day back after the weekend went pretty smoothly. Because it is Monday, the students began with their weekend journals and wrote down their favorite activity they did over the weekend. Then, when that was complete the students took a math worksheet that focused on MONEY and started to work on it quietly at their desks. I walked around and helped the students who had questions or needed a little extra help deciphering which coins they should use to add together to create certain amounts. Even though not everyone was finished, Ms. Hildebrand started to go over the answers on the board to save time. By then, it was snack time! The students got their snacks and sat down at their desks while Ms. H read off the weekend journals and the students guessed whose journal she was reading. It was interesting to see the kids guess names because even though every student only wrote one weekend journal, the students would still guess names of people whose journals had already been read, as if they had written two. When all the journals were read, snack was over and the students lined up at the door with their chairs to head over to Ms. Jensen's class for Geology! Mr. Jensen read a story to all the students about a boy who collects rocks and organizes them in different ways. So, that is exactly what the students did. They found a partner, sat at a desk, and Ms. Hildebrand handed out plastic dishes of river rocks to each pair. The students organized the rocks into different categories: shiny rocks, soft rocks, big rocks, small rocks, flat rocks etc. They were also given magnifying glasses to examine the rocks. At 10:00 it was time for specials, so Ms. H's class lined up at the door and went down to the Library. The students returned the books they had, checked out new books, and the librarian read them two books aloud. After Library, the students went back up to Mr. J's class for a few minutes to finish their activity with the rocks and then it was time for lunch. After lunch and recess, Ms. H continued to read Holes to the students while they had snack. After story time the students went back to their seats for Cursive. Ms. Hildebrand wrote the uppercase letters for I,J,K, and L on the board and the kids copied them down on their own papers for practice. Cursive practice was not very long and after that came Fairy Tales! The kids lined up at the door and went over to Mr. Jensen's room to figure out what stage they were at in the writing process and in which room they would work in. I stayed in Ms. Hildebrand's class with all the students who had completed putting their stories and pictures into their books and were ready to decorate their covers. My job was to cut out decorating paper of their choice and fit it to the cover of their books. The kids worked on this until the end of the day! Hopefully all their books will be complete by the end of the week!