203B Activities

Activities for August 21-25, 2007
The year has hardly begun and already so much has happened. We've only been here for five days and as one of the two class reporters for the week (Ying is writing the report for the newsletter), I've been a little distracted learning to type, proofread, spell check, and upload this page to the server along with the artwork. It's also my assignment to pass along this knowledge to the next reporter. I'll have a chance to write a story for the newsletter the next time my turn comes around.

Seating arrangement Monday and Tuesday were basically orientation days. We all found and "personalized" our seats. Don't worry, it will come off. We got to know our neighbors and the rest of the class. Once a month we will rearrange the seats, but for the time being the classroom looks like the picture here. The teacher is a newbie and has help from not one but two volunteers who are really nice, but don't let us get away with anything. You can see them in the picture. We spent a lot of time making class rules. Everyone participated and so far none has been broken, but then there hasn't been enough time to figure out the best way to do that.

Wednesday's highlight was learning to play my first note on the recorder. It wasn't the note that the other kids were playing, but I'm still convinced that mine was the right one. The teacher did get the computer to play the note that he was expecting to hear from us, but it didn't help much.

On Thursday we had our first real day with everything in the schedule: math, spelling, science, reading, social studies, art, lunch, and recess. For recess our school is doing something new this year. They still let us run around doing nothing in particular, but we can optionally try to organize larger games using some signup sheets. Basically portions of the playground are reserved on different days for a soccer or kickball game.

Multiplication problem Today is Friday, so I was excused from spelling, reading, and art in order to record this week. In math we did multiplication of two digit numbers. We got to correct our own work by comparing it to a computer's work including all the intermediate steps. Someday soon we'll just make the computer do the whole thing.

Claire