Frustrated.

We began the day with another activity from our Story Works magazine about personification-giving human characteristics to something non-human, in this case, punctuation. Then, we sorted our words and found the familiar generalization of "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." Hopefully, since this generalization is familiar, we'll have an ok time proving it tomorrow! In Writer's Workshop, we continued to publish our small moment stories. If your child is still not finished, maybe they can work on it some at home as we typed them up in Google Apps. If they don't finish during class tomorrow, I'll have them bring their rough drafts home. Thanks for your help with getting these completed! We finished Wonder...sniff...sniff... What did your kiddo think of the book?! In Reader's Workshop, we continued with our Time For Kids work and reading independently while some blogged and/or visited the Media Center. We had a good Number Talk today to show that by knowing, truly knowing, those basic multiplication facts, they can really solve any problem. The problem that taught them this was 4 x 49. No big deal! I pointed out that they have so much confidence during mental math that they should carry this into all aspects of math! After our Number Talk, we looked at patterns on the number line and then patterns within a growing staircase. They are doing really well with this. Finally, we continued our work with landforms in Social Studies.

Now to the frustration. These 26 children (yes, Karleigh moved :( ) are amazing! I hold them at such a high level of expectation because they are so wonderful. So today, when the room was atrocious and they were socializing and keeping each other from working, I got very frustrated. Please help remind your child that when it is time to work, they need to get to work. Also, are their rooms really messy at home?! Some of them are SOOOO messy!! :) We'll work on it, no biggie, just wanted you to be aware so you could reinforce this at home too. Thank you for all you do!!