Way to Talkative Monday

Well parents, today was not the day I was hoping for.  We have really been starting to move forward and today it was like starting over from scratch.  The students were sluggish, not participating, and were having a hard to processing or answering questions at all.  Don't know what happened between Friday and Today.. but it was as if they were different students.  Hopefully tomorrow we REBOUND back to my smart third graders!!!

• 1st and 2nd - We started the day with number talks. Today's focus was on subtracting using mental math, finding friendly numbers, and then using what you already know to solve mental math problems.  We then moved to our Problem of the Day to see if they could remember the wording to create a multiplication sentence.  After that we moved into lesson 4.4 on using the distributive property in multiplication.  
• 6 x 8 can be thought of as 6 x (4 + 4)  since 6x4 is easier than 6x8.
• So then it becomes 6x4 + 6x4  (still 6 x 8 really)
• 24 + 24 = 48
• We wanted the students to see that if they don't know the bigger facts, they can break them down (distribute) them into smaller chunks to get the right answer.  4 x 25 is the same as 4x10 + 4 x 10 + 4 x5   or 4 x (10+10+5) 40 + 40 + 20 or 100!   We worked through the unlock the problems using the interactive lesson online.  Then students did the try this on their own.  Homework is the practice section. 

• 3rd and 4th - We started 3rd period off taking our Week 7 Spelling Pretest.  The words this week focus on the A sound with AI and AY as the focus.  The kids did ok, but need to do a lot of studying this week.  We then went into Readygen Lesson 1B.11 on using the text structure to understand main idea and key details.  They had to look at the books and using the structure, find meaning.  We did a read aloud from National Geographic Kids SPIDERS (#146076) together.  We discussed all the key text features and how they give meaning to the text and help you understand the topic.  We took the AR test and then moved into independent work which was using a 4 column chart to find examples of "Capital Letters", "Boldface Words", "Captions" and "Bullets" in the class text - "At the Root of It".  After modeling on pages 3-5, students were sent off to independently work through the rest of the text, take any AR tests they needed to take, and then independently read.   They did not work very fast today, so the lesson took a long time to accomplish.
• 5th - Lunch (No recess today - too talkative, not working hard)
• 6th - Dance with Mr. Nunez
• 7th - For the first 15 minutes, Ms. Avalos read from the class novel "Emma on the Air!"   Then we started Chapter 1 of our Science Book about plants.  We read part of the chapter, again focusing on the text elements and how they help us understand the text.

Homework:

• Math - Lesson 4.4 Practice  pp. 213-214

• Reading - Quick Read Week 3 Day 3

• Spelling - 2 x each