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.
Tuesday was my day at Kaiser School. It was windy and rainy, and the kids were hyper. We did the usual phonics, math, and creative writing workshops. Then I worked one on one with several children. This is the group I help with reading. Most of them are really improving. One little girl still sounds out most of the words instead of smooth reading.
The rain stopped long enough to have outside recess. That really helps since they can run off all that energy.
When they came in I read a book to them. This time it wasn’t a storybook, it was a science lesson. The book is The Reasons for Seasons by Gail Gibbons. I couldn’t find a decent website. They sell it, but you can’t see any of the pictures. In a nutshell, the book is about the earth’s travels around the sun and how the tilt of our axis makes the different seasons. The kids seemed to take all that in and asked good questions.
Our big science lessons came from another teacher, Mr. R. Every year he brings an incubator to the classroom. He also provides fertile duck eggs and if all goes well, we hatch ducklings in 28 days.
He gave a lesson on all that must be done to be sure the eggs hatch. He has done this enough that he was prepared for the questions. How do the ducks get inside the egg? What is a fertile egg? How did it get fertile? What does the Daddy duck do? How do the eggs get inside the Mommy duck? He told them enough to satisfy them, and didn’t go technical on them.
One important thing he told them, sometimes all the ducks don’t make it. If there is a power failure, none will make it. He even used the die word. There have been years when no ducks hatched. You have to prepare the kids for real life.
