Paragraph 1 of three paragraph essay.

This morning we slept in after the late night last night.  I thought I would have very grumpy kids today but so far we are doing ok. 

This morning for fun I got out the dry erase maps I bought the other day and nathan and Genevieve labeled all the countries they knew.  I was surprised at how many they got!  They wanted to know more so I gave them a country and asked if they could figure out where it was, and then I have hints.  Nathan and Gigi both really liked this. 

Next up we did moving beyond the page.  We worked on our essay.   I had anticipated writting 3 paragraphs today, but I changed that to writing 1 as it was taking them a while to do this.  I thought having their ideas written down already would help but that did not.  

Genevieve's paragraph started out well, but then she really strayed off topic.  It was well written but not what we needed, so she will need to work on this another day. Our printer is out of ink (Jeff remind me to get some ink), so I didn't print hers out.  I let Gigi type hers today and I found she payed more attention to spelling this way.  She could see she spelt the word wrong and she was willing to look at the word and figure out how it should be spelt.  She did this by phonics, she is so good at phonics, but not as good at spelling, I understand it's a different concept, but I don't really understand why :)

Here is Nathan's first paragraph, of his essay.  I worked with him getting him to discuss what he wanted to convey to the reader.  He would read out what he had written and then he would verbally get his next sentence worked out before typing it. He would then re-read his sentence and see if he could improve on it.  

I just copied and pasted Nathan's work

                There is a circle of power between Poppy and Mr. Ocax, because they are different from each other.   Mr.  Ocax is at the top of the circle of power, because he scares them to take control of them.  He even killed ragweed, Poppy’s boyfriend.  Mr Ocax made all mice afraid of porcupines by telling  them they were vicious, and porcupines would eat them,  but he told them he would protect them from the vicious porcupines.  One of the differences between the mice and Mr Ocax, is one is good and one is bad, I leave it to you to decide which one is bad?  The mice have not been anywhere because Mr Ocax controls them with fear, it makes them different because one has more knowledge of world then the other.  The mice and Mr. Ocax are different because as I said before one is good and one is bad.

After mbtp, we moved on to math, both nathan and Gigi did dreambox again.  Gigi did some work in her book as well.  

At the moment they are dancing in the hallway to Christmas music.  Safely dancing in their own space, without endangering other classmates.  Lol.  I know there are way too many plo's on dancing :)

Genevieve dancing in my room, I think trying to get me in the music, playing let it snow.  Although my feet feel cold enough it may be getting ready to snow.