Danger Words...and new desks to come :)

These are the words students have been having the most problems with over the last four weeks in a wide selection of written pieces. This chart is now up in the classroom and students will  need to thoroughly check their written assignments to make sure none of these words are incorrect.

The latest t-ball photos taken on Friday are also up on the store room door.

Today: assembly, Japanese, P.E. and Library. In the afternoon we concentrated on spelling words with the au pattern. We also looked at same of the words in our language that have the combination mn:
solemn
column
hymn
mnemonics



I asked students if they could find out any other words that might have this unusual combination.  I can think of a few. In some the n is silent and in others it is not.

Homework tonight is to finish the spelling level they are on. A couple of students managed to finish this in class time today, well done!

A small group of four students who didn't need to do the lesson on the au words started cutting out and sewing their softies. They worked very well with limited supervision.

Students have set up the A-Z sheet ready for the microcosmos competition which is mentioned in the blog preceding this one.

Below is a picture of the days of the week activity the students did in Japanese. 

Students finished their Japanese lesson with the game at the following link:
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Japanese/Daysmonths.htm

The best news of the day is some new desks for the classroom and some vital mathematics gear  are on order. Yipeeeee!

Yeast Experiment (take 2) and T-Ball in the drizzle

This morning students survived the test on contractions with the average score being 8.8 out of 10. This was followed by Silent Reading time in which I marked them and gave individual feedback to students. We then did our second take on the yeast experiment. This time it worked. We will do the next practical session on the coming Thursday as I am loaning our precious bottles to a fellow staff member to use during the first half of next week. Like me, he inherited casi nada.

After lunch we did a small comprehension activities where students located the keywords in a text about yeast. and learnt to locate the key sentence (idea) in a paragraph.  We also explored some boxes and had four riddle-offs (Guess the answer to a riddle.) I also carried out the South Australian Spelling Test to pinpoint exact spelling ages as the SWST test only measures to 12.0+, this one will measure to 15.5+.  It will also give me a second set of data  just in case any student just had a bad test first time around with the standardised test administered in their first week back in February.

In the afternoon I explained the rules of t-ball and we headed out onto the oval for a game. The equipment was a little bit of a challenge but we still had fun and the students were amazing with their sportsmanship. We came back in at 2:40 as it was raining quite heavily at this stage. We ended the day with a quiz and did the seating draw for next week. I still owe each team an innings.

The stand before the top fell off

Next week there will be The Grand Microcosmos Competition where students will have to do quite a bit of concerted reading to match information panels to beautiful and fascinating images of life under the electron microscope. They will have to read the written texts and the visual texts very closely looking for the clues which will allow a correct match up. Feel free to drop in before school if you would like to give your son/daughter a hand.  Each student will be given a sheet with the letters A-Z and will write what they think is the corresponding piece of text, all of which carry a number from 1 -26. All correct entries will go into a draw for a prize which  actually haven't thought about yet. We will be looking the differences between a run-of-the mill microscope and an electron microscope.