Monday with Ms. O'Donnell and Ms. Albert

Happy Halloween everybody! I came in for the morning only this Monday and met with the 3rd and 5th grade classes. In 3rd grade we completed our tally up of what our pictures "cost". These were a lot of coins to tally up, but they did a great job, considering. I brought them home to mark and find out how everybody did.

Here's the breakdown:

• 3 absent students
• 1 student transferred the correct number of tallies for Q, D, N, P, but did not add them up
• 12 students correctly added up their pictures/tallies
• 7 students incorrectly added up their coins, however of the 7 four of them were only off by one coin (a matter of either transposing their count wrong or miscounting over or under one coin), so only 3 students were really off.

After the tally we created 10 coin cards with random stampings to create a "War" deck of cards. They tallied up the coin counts on each card to write small on the back side. Hopefully they'll have some time to play with their decks!

In 5th grade we talked about stencils and templates, and how they have to be very simple shapes. We also talked about posters and why someone would make a poster. The kids offered ideas such as for advertising or for presenting information and that they have words and pictures. I said our sunprints will be like posters that show what they know about the sun after all they've been learning in their science classes. We based our stencil designs on their drawings from last week, but they needed to SIMPLIFY a lot. They all sketched out a new version in their books for approval and then we passed out paper for making the stencil. I went around with a small whiteboard to sketch out examples of how they could alter their images to be more stencil-like. Once drawn and approved again, the kids cut out all their stencil shapes. Those with time were asked to write something that explained "What I know about sun energy" and connected to their image in some way. it would be great if they could plan out the writing portion for next week so that we can transfer the text to our transparencies for our sun prints.