Gerry Cheevers and Art-man

An interesting title for this post I know, but we were on a small tangent this morning, and we ended up talking about Gerry Cheevers!  Anyway we has a wonderful week.  We worked on adding leads and conclusions to literary essays, investigated fractions with common and similar denominators, and continued our work with Lego Mindstorms Robots.

In writing we have been working on crafting essays that hinge on a thesis, and aim to prove this thesis to the reader.  This week we worked on crafting leads and conclusions for these.  In leads we worked to introduce the large theme that connects to our thesis, and "funnel" our readers toward the thesis statement. In conclusions we worked on reminding our readers of our thesis statement, humanizing our evidence, and giving our readers a follow up action.

We are also diving into adding and subtracting fractions with common denominators.  Many students are grasping the idea that in order to add fractions denominators need to be the same.  We are modelling this concept with fraction strips (these are just pieces of paper) that we can fold to illustrate different fractions.

Here are some authentic reflections from the week:

This week, we were working more with Mindstorms’ robots. We were trying to get them to find and follow a dark line. I was sick on Wednesday, and I have not done Robots since Monday.

Today has been a awesome morning!  I loved waking up knowing that I would have time to get ready for school!  I also loved that I had fun on the bus ride, that doesn’t always happen!  I can not wait to Green Up today!  I love Greening UP!    

This week the ukers are staining their ukuleles (I’m one of them) and we’re still programing robots. Arlyn won’t be in library when we're doing library, but we’re doing digital passport with a sub.

This week we have been studying the human body and what parts of the body intrest us to study, senses, muscles, bones...etc… I am going to focus on the brain and the eyes, and how they connect. The first step would be what parts of the eye the light passes through, and about those parts. Next there would be how the light passes into the brain and sends the message to the body and the image appears.


As always have a restful and relaxing weekend.

-Dave