Metaphors

Sorry of the long delay in our last entry, but I wanted to share some exciting work that my students have been doing around metaphors.

We recently took our reading comprehension mid-year assessment, and the results showed that we needed to work on our understanding of figurative language.  Thus, we're exploring metaphors.

To begin the unit, we briefly discussed the definition of metaphor, and we looked at examples of metaphors for life.  We then made our own metaphors for life with illustrations.  Some examples follow.  (By the way, we would be interested in your metaphors for life.)

We then read some poems and discussed how the authors used metaphors to explain their ideas about the subjects to the audience.  Below are the poems and some illustrations explaining the metaphors.

Hope     by Emily Dickenson

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune--without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity, 
It asked a crumb of me.

The Sea
	The sea is a hungry dog, Giant and grey. He rolls on the beach all day. With his clashing teeth and shaggy jaws
5	Hour upon hour he gnaws The rumbling, tumbling stones, And 'Bones, bones, bones, bones!' The giant sea-dog moans, Licking his greasy paws.
10	And when the night wind roars And the moon rocks in the stormy cloud, He bounds to his feet and snuffs and sniffs, Shaking his wet sides over the cliffs, And howls and hollos long and loud.
15	But on quiet days in May or June, When even the grasses on the dune Play no more their reedy tune, With his head between his paws He lies on the sandy shores,
20	So quiet, so quiet, he scarcely snores.
—James Reeves

Today

Today we had physical education.  We needed to move Skittles with straws and can not touch it,
and we had art with another class and in writing we wrote the personal background section of for the explorers that we are studing.

science

science: what we did in science was to watch a video of erosion and make observation
of what we saw.

Math: we solved problems with different expression and trying to get the same
answer.

writing: we talk with our partners and said what we should write next about the explorations of Ponce de Leon.

science

• In science we did was we did an experiment because we were researching a question about where the safest place to build a home on a mountain.  We wanted to see if the water would erode the land away from the houses.
• Then we went to the bathroom.
• After that we went to Ms. Peterson's class and did writing about Juan Ponce de Leon.  While there we discussed if he was violent or non-violent toward the Native Indians in Puerto Rico.

BLACK OUT BULLYING

Yesterday we did black-out bullying it is about that this school is trying to be bully free becaues we are trying to stop bullying forever so nobody gets bullied again in school.

Computer and Reading

Today in computers we did:

• reports on a country or city because we are working on report writing.
• we also played Firstinmath for 15 minutes because we need to practice math so we can become better experts in math.

Today in reading we did:

• independent reading because Mr.V was working with a group on their guided reading book. 
• Me (Andrea) and Noelia worked with Mr.V for 15 minutes on our guided reading book (Louis Braille) and he taught us 2 column chart that we can use to make a response to a prompt correctly. 

Tuesday, January 24

• Today in science, we added things to the black-out bullying poster so peolpe can stop bullying.
• In math, we talked about sets of problems to learn more about that.
• In writing, we talked about de Leon.

art

• at art we where coloring what we have drawn.
• Math we are working in are new subject: area and perimeter.
• In writing we where seing posters of Christopher Columbus and disagreeng.            
• Reading we were presenting our books.

physical Education

Math; we were practicing multipliying fractions and getting reading for our
assessment.

P.E. - we were working about black-out bullying.

SCIENCE

In science we did a model of the Grand Canyon because we had a big question, "What happens if water flows through the canyon's materials?"

In math we talk about multiplication story problems because Mr. V wants to know  if we remember about multiplication. 

Then we started to talk about middle school because I asked about the list of middle schools.

Yesterday in computer and writing

What we did in computers :

• We researched explorers we were interested in writing a report on
• We played firstinmath when we were done researching the explorers

What we did in writing :

• We read with our partners in Mrs. Peterson's class about Christopher Columbus
• We did a 3 colum chart and in one colum we wrote David Adler , in the middle we wrote Same, and in the third colum we wrote Article

Physical Education and Math

Today in physical education we did a worksheet about the body.  Then we saw a video about making healthy food that you can make at home.

Today in math we wrote in the math notebook about what we did in the past 4 moths, and then we talked about a test were taking on Math 20.  Also, we talked about what is going to be on the test.

Wednesday

on 12/21/11 we had a math test :
On the math test we did :

• We added fractions
• We had story problems with fractions
• Placed fractions on a number line
• We answer multiple choice questions

In social studies we did:

• We did a migrating game that was about we had to pick a place in the room and we had to descided the place we picked and draw it and what we will change about it to make it feel like home. And we read about native Americans' origin stories, and we looked at a graphic organizer

but in PE we were laughing and we need to write a note to our families saying why we did not have PE

Tuesday

Science

• In science we where talking about the water cycle and wrote in a poster about what we know  about the water cycle.

Writing

• we were working in group to talk about the facts of Christopher Columbus and we were reading a book.

Future Posts

Hello Readers,

I have had requests for a continuation of our posts.  I apologize for the absence of news from Room 214A. 

In an effort to remedy that, my students will be taking turns posting, and it will begin today.

Thank you,
Mr. V

Monday

ART

• What we did in art was we did Christmas cards for our beloveded family because next week is Christmas, so Ms. Madden wanted us to make a card to someone in our family

READING

• What we did in reading was reading assesments-its a reading test to see what level of reading you are and the great news is that every one past a level
• next we did a cause and effect worksheet that told us what was cause and effect 
• then we did indepent reading that I say was really fun because you learned a lot

More about the food chain

We need to clarify our previous post because we have learned more about the food chain.

The food chain has four parts as a pyramid.  The first level is the producers.  The second level is herbivores.  The third level is carnivores.  The final level is decomposers.  Decomposers are bacteria, fungus and worms.  When an animal eats part of a plant and leaves some, the decomposers break down the rest of the plant and make it into soil.

We learned that if part of the chain breaks, it affects the entire chain.

Science

Today in science, we talked about:

• the human body and about the nervous system.  Specifically, we learned that nerves are connected to the brain.
• ecosystems and what they are.  They are places where abiotic (non-living) and biotic (living) entities depend on each other.
• changes in our terrariums and aquariums, like the water in the aquarium decreasing and the plants in the terrariums grew.
• food chains.  A video said that the food chain is like a game with 4 levels that look likes a pyramid.   The first level consists of herbivores and where plants die and decompose.  The second and third levels include carnivores.  The fourth level includes worms, bacteria and bugs.

Recent News

In math we have been talking about angles.  We have been measuring the angles of different shapes with the angles of other shapes.  For example, we use a square and put the vertex of a rhombus into the vertex of the square, and we discovered that three of the rhombuses' angles fit into the right angle of the square, so we know that the acute angles of our rhombuses equal 30 degrees each.  Then we can use those angles to help us measure other unknown angles.

In sadder news, Perla and Katelyn left our classroom, and some of us were crying.  We didn't know that Katelyn was leaving until her cousin came to pick up her things because she was returning to the Dominican Republic.  With Perla, she left because she moved to a different place in Boston, but the bus wouldn't pick her up where she lived, so she had to go to a different school.

Today

In Writing, we were adding transitions words.  These are words that we use to help the reader understand the flow of our writing.  For example, we could use "first," "then," and "after that" to show the reader the order of our thoughts.

In Science, we discussed how we are going to improve our bridges next time.  One idea is to expand the bridges to cover the 12 inch gap and use the cable design.   To do this, one uses an acute triangle and cables or wires hang off the triangle and connect to the other acute triangles.

In Math, we talked about geometry, specifically about quadrilaterals, which are shapes that have four sides, four vertices, and four angles.  Some specific quadrilaterals are squares, rhombuses, trapezoids, and rectangles.  Since we are looking at the attributes of polygons, we also found synonyms for the word "attributes."  Some these include "characteristics," "features," "qualities," and "traits."