WhatchamaDRAWit

I meant to write this earlier, except things got busy before I left school...

The new student and her mom stopped by later than I'd expected, but we had a chance to introduce ourselves and get her acquainted with the classroom, etc. I threw so much information at them, I will be surprised if any of it sinks in. Most of it is written on the papers I gave them, so if they look at that, they'll be fine. They don't have a working computer at home, so doing NaNo at home will be a problem... I'm not sure what to set her word goal at. We're halfway through the month, so it should be 1000 or less, but with Thanksgiving break in there, it maybe should be even less... Her homework over the weekend is to start her story by hand, and she can always type it at school. Which reminds me... she needs an account. You think the IT guys will make one for her before the end of the year?

We had time for art today for once, and we used the time to FINALLY do our leaf projects. We started saving leaves in September and pressed them in our Bibles to keep them safe. Not all of them had enough leaves, so they could go outside and get more. Lots of leaf piles on the desks. Some made their whole picture from leaves, some added pencil/pen lines to make their picture more detailed. After they finished that, we tried our new art game. It's super fun! WhatchamaDRAWit is kind of like Apples to Apples. A prompt card is drawn, and everyone has to draw what's on the card. After everyone is done, you get to vote for your favorite. Each pod got a stack of cards and competed amongst themselves. Examples of the cards include: an ice cream cone riding a bike playing the trumpet, or a friendly monster with 13 eyes, 8 arms, and three heads. During art, we listened to the Christmas program music. Man is it catchy! We start practice next week already.

The other fun thing we did today was for English. I had Miss M make construction paper folders and glue landscape calendar pages inside. Each student got one folder (numbered on the inside). They had to keep it a total secret while writing a story that takes place in the scene, or a descriptive paragraph of it. Then each got to read their paragraph while their classmates tried to guess which number the story matched with. They LOVED it. We have plenty of folders to do it again. And the end of the year is coming up, so people will be getting rid of their calendars. I can make some more! I wanted to make it challenging, so I tried to have some pictures that looked kind of similar, so they'd need to write more description to get their classmates to guess correctly. Miss M and I also wrote descriptive paragraphs. Pretty much everyone guessed everyone right!