Thursday, April 19, 2012

Hazards of Teaching and other things

Tuesday as I was dressing to volunteer with the first graders, there was a medical report on the radio.  There is a new strain of Hand, Foot, Mouth disease.  This is something that small children get and it spreads quickly.

At school I said something to Ms. H about the disease and she told me about another disease, Slapped Cheek disease.   Joy, two new things I can catch while doing a good deed. You could catch them too.  Be sure to read the two links. 

The first part of the morning the students were working at different stations on different projects.  My favorite was the math area.  The 5 students had worksheets with almost addition problems.  The problems looked like this.

___ + ___ = ____       here there was a large empty box

They had to roll  2 dice to make the problem, write what came up, and put down the answer.

3   + 5 = 8       In the box they had to use tally marks to prove the equation.

The next worksheet they used 3 dice.  They really like this type of problems.

If you remember we have an incubator with duck eggs.  Their art and creative writing projects were tied to eggs.  They discussed who and what has eggs.  What lays eggs, what has live births.  They learned the word  oviparous. Then Ms. H passed out pictures of eggs they drew before Easter ( they were pc and called spring eggs). 

The children were to draw what would hatch coming out of their egg.  It could be real or fiction.  Then they had to write about their creation.  What is it?  What does it look like?  What can it do?  What can it not do?  The creature will be cut out and the writing put under it and displayed on the bulletin boards.  We had a lot of dragons.  But there were ducks and snakes also. 

I continued with the egg line with the book I read to them.  I have had a senior moment and can’t remember the name of the book.  But it starts with the Mom and Dad ducks building a nest and she lays eggs.  The process of the duckling breaking out of the egg is shown in several pictures.  We discussed why the male duck is brightly colored and the female is drab.  They saw how the duckling changes and grows.  The book took them through the whole growing cycle and back to time to build a nest. 

The children seem well informed about ducks.  Next week they will get to see the breaking out of the shell if we are lucky.  It takes 10 hours for the duckling to escape.  They are due to start hatching Tuesday or Wednesday.  It could be during class, or during the night.  I will keep you posted.

1 comment:

ButchCountry said...

Slap cheek disease is more commonly known as fifth disease, it's very common, harmless, just looks like the affected person has been slapped hard across the face,arms,back or legs, usually lasts for a few days and disappears, its painless just unsightly, zinc oxide helps speed the clearing.