March 21, 2013

The students did a wonderful job performing Mr. Bell's Magnificent Ringing Machine, both on Monday for the school and on Tuesday for their families! Many teachers and Mr. Bennett told me how much they enjoyed it.

Students are finishing up their literature circle books. I was pleased with how many students told me they finished their book early because they couldn't put it down! We'll be making posters to try to convince other people to read the books next week, and then we'll be doing guided reading in April with books that share a theme of justice. In writing, students are working on four paragraph essays about why they like Chicago. I'm emphasizing with them the importance of indenting new paragraphs and organizing the essays well using clear topic sentences.

In science, we're learning about heat, sound, and light. This will be a unit we'll continue after break. So far, we've made "ice insulators" to keep an ice cube from melting, sound sandwiches, and investigated tuning forks. Today, we'll talk about instruments and how they are built to produce different pitches. Students will need to build their own instruments to share with the class next Wednesday. These can be as realistic or as simple as the students wish. The requirements are that they are able to explain how it produces sound, and show and explain how it makes a high and low pitch.

I hope everyone is ready to enjoy a relaxing and holy Easter break! Over break, I expect the students to continue reading, and they will have some boxes on their reading log to fill out. Their social studies state projects will also be due the week we come back, so they should be working on those.