Where has the week gone?

I find it hard to believe it is Thursday night.  The week flew by and I did so little.  Monday no Marriage Factory.  Marty had a 7:30 meeting in the opposite direction, so I stayed home.  The curse of only one car.  But Tuesday I made it to Kaiser School and worked with the first graders.

I have mentioned how record breaking cold the Bay Area has been.  One of my medications makes me be cold when everyone else is hot.  But Tuesday the classroom was cold, everyone had on their coats.   No heat over night and the room didn't warm up for a couple of hours.   It wasn't unbearable, but I was uncomfortable.  I was missing my electric throw. 

I mainly was organizing  homework packets and making packets of work from the last couple of weeks.  I also listened to the children read. Then I was called into extra duty.  During recess Ms. H came in and asked me to go to the playground and take the class to the library.  She was taking care of another class while the teacher received some first aid.  So off I went outside to the cold cold playground.  Thankfully I wasn't there long before time to go the library.  Ms. H was back in about 20 minutes.

Back in our classroom I read to the class.  Then they did some creative writing.  Their phonics' sound for the day was ar.  As Ms. H said, "Who knew ar could be so hard."  They had listed lots of ar words such as dark, car, start, star, barn, far.  But they just didn't lock into the sound.  So they had to draw a car, a very special car.  It could go into the future, or go back to the time of the dinosaur's.  Maybe their car could fly, or was silly.  It was their car and they had to write about it using ar words in three sentences.  They really got into their special cars. 

Wednesday made I country ham puffs for a  party this weekend.  These can be made ahead of time and frozen.  So I made extra for Christmas brunch.

Today was another clean out the closet day.  I filled a huge bag with clothes to go to the Salvation Army. I have now lost 52 pounds and most clothes in my closet hangs on me.  This is a good thing, except I am now down to my smallest clothing.  Five more pounds and I will have to buy clothes.  I have found a shop a block from us that has really low prices and cute clothes.   This will be my new favorite spot to shop. 

Marty just told me we are invited to a cocktail party Friday afternoon.  I am going even though I won't be drinking.  Marty says he will be taking me to dinner afterwards.  YAY, no cooking!

Beginning blends and the magic silent e

Tuesday at Kaiser School the first graders were getting a heavy dose of phonics.  During workshop, instead of small groups working on different skills, everyone had the same worksheet.  One side had pictures and then the ending of the words.  The children had to put in the beginning blend.

A picture of  grapes        apes.  They wrote in the blank gr.  grapes.  They had bl, gr, sl, sk, tr, st to pick from.  Most of it was easy.  Snail, trunk, tree . . .   And then regional and age differences showed up. There was a picture of a blouse.  80% of them didn't know what it was.  All they could think of was shirt, but the clue was      ouse.  Little girls wear cute shirts today, not a blouse.  Then we had a sled and ice skates.  No idea what those are.  It doesn't snow in the Bay Area.  Some of them might go skiing, but if they do something like sledding, they use a snow disc.  Ice skating, not in their vocabulary.

Later they worked on the vowel blank silent e rule.   In words ending with a vowel, a consonant, and a silent e, the vowel will be long.  No e, the vowel is short.  We had 10 sentences with a word left out.  They had a choice of two words and had to add the correct word.

I like to _______ my bike.       rid      ride

The lamp is ________.            dim   dime

The page had a ________ .      rip   ripe

This didn't go well because some used only the words ending in e.  That is what we are studying, so it has to be right.  They didn't read the sentences.  When I had them read the sentences to me, they would say, "Oh, that doesn't make sense."  It is not just we have a long vowel.  It is also no e we must have a short vowel.

Ms H asked me to read to the children.  YAY!  It was one of my favorite books, Herb the Vegetarian Dragon.  If you are not familiar with this book, do check out the link. The illustrations are wonderful. And there are lots of things on the website that are fun to check out, like recipes. The point of this book is it is wrong to condemn others for living differently than you do. We all can be different and still live together and be friends.  At the same time this book is not the sweet PC book that is dumbed down so the children will not be scared.  The dragons eat people, pictures show people in the dragons' mouths.  Herb is almost beheaded.  The children love this book.  They also know it is make believe.  Just like my generation knew Hansel and Gretal were not really in danger and they didn't really throw the witch into the oven.  It is called make believe.

We did a lot of work yesterday.  The children really buckled down and finished their work.  No one stayed in at recess.  No one really acted out yesterday.  A very successful school day.