Carter Current for March 16th

Hello there! It has been a great week here in the Carter Classroom. We’ve learned about everything from electricity to David Letterman, with a little bit of everything that falls between those two subjects. It was very good to get back to “normal”, at least for a little while.

Reading
By now, the biographies have been read and turned in. Now the students should be working on their next book for the six weeks. Next Monday I’ll be handing out another class book for the kids to read, with probably a three week schedule for reading it. I’d say which book it is, but knowing these kids, half of them would have it completely read by Monday, and I want to at least all start together!

Social Studies
For Social Studies this week, in the aftermath of learning about the Civil War, we learned about various attractions around the state of Indiana, including all of its parks and a handful of its famous politicians. After that, we started something called “Hoosier Spotlight”, in which we will learn about a different famous Hoosier every day. We started off this week with David Letterman and Madame C.J. Walker, two disparate people with one thing in common—they hail from our great state.

Science
I was very proud of the kids after last week’s bones quiz. Learning the scientific names of the bones is a little daunting, but I think it’s something they’ll always remember—or at least it will be familiar to them when they get into high school biology. This week we’ve been learning about the digestive system, which is pretty interesting in its own right. The kids seem to think this is a pretty cool thing to learn about—of course, it may have something to do with the high percentage of boys in the class.

We also learned a thing or two about electricity this week. We found that electricity flows from the positive end of the battery, through the wire, and back to the negative end. If you put a light bulb in the path, it lights up--as long as it’s part of the connection. When that connection is bypassed, the kids realized something different altogether happened. We’ll be continuing this for awhile.

Math
In Math we’re wrapping up our unit on probability. The good news is that it looks like we’re going to finish the book early this year. That way we can go back and work on some of the areas where the kids struggled before.