The Long Now

Hey, there, everyone! Hopefully everyone is hard at work on their book report projects. We've even had a few trickling in already, so that is really good to see. Remember the due date is this Friday, February 10th. These were handed out on January 10th, so I will have a hard time accepting anything later than that.

One thing I would like to profoundly apologize for is the spelling list this week. I honestly don't know what they were thinking putting predominate on there instead of predominant, which is not only much more commonly used, but also has a much easier definition. I told the kids yesterday that I do not expect them to know that definition nor be able to use that one in a sentence. And I have a hard time thinking of when I've heard the word premeditate used in anything other than a murder trial on television, but so be it. At least you can premeditate a birthday party...I suppose!

Here's Miss Priser's list for this week:

predominate
premeditate
react
reconsider
recount
refund
reorganize
replace
reread
revisit
made
my
nice
please

Here's my list for this week:

predominate
premeditate
react
reconsider
recount
refund
reorganize
replace
reread
reposition
reunited
preoccupied

There are a lot of words on this list that are pretty difficult. I told the kids to focus on being able to spell the root word, and then to just know that you need to add either re- or pre- to the beginning of it.

Also, when I sent home those Theme Tests yesterday and told the kids to make corrections and bring them back, I noticed that the correct answers had already been circled on them (sorry, I had an aid do that for me on Thursday). I told them to just make sure they understood what they got wrong and to discuss with me if they didn't get it. I am going to give everybody a half point back for each one they got wrong--I haven't entered them in the grade book anyway. In the future, I plan to do this for all tests. I will give them the test back, have them make corrections, and turn it back in for half credit if they choose to do so.

Members of my Math class should have noticed a "Whoops Sheet" come home yesterday for much the same reason. They did pretty darn well for the most part, but I wanted them to have the opportunity to learn from what went wrong on the test. Now we've moved into rates and ratios, and they were struggling somewhat yesterday. Luckily we have time to slow down a bit and take as much time as we need to for a little while.