Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mí

Today we began our week of learning about Cesar Chavez to coincide with the Cesar Chavez Day of Service and Learning coming up.  Each day we will spend some time learning about the life and work of Cesar Chavez as we lead up to our Friday assembly when several classes will educate about and pay tribute to the life and legacy of Chavez.  Our class will be singing and telling about the song De Colores.  De Colores is a traditional song originally from Spain that has been adopted by the United Farm Workers as a common anthem sung at their meetings and rallies. You can find the tune and the lyrics to the song, in both Spanish and English at this website.  Today, the students read short biographies about Cesar Chavez, categorized some of the information we learned about him, and had a discussion about his work with migrant farm workers. Tomorrow we will spend some time reading some autobiographical passages from people who were involved with the UFW and their memories of singing De Colores.

In vocabulary this week, the roots are bene- good, mal- bad, ante- before, and post- after.  We did our sort today and learned about some of the words with the roots.  An interesting fact I learned today was about the etymology of the disease name, malaria.  Malaria literally comes from roots meaning “bad air,” because when it was initially diagnosed it was thought to be spread through the air. What interesting words do you know with the roots of the week?  Take a look over at the online Etymology Dictionary to learn more about their creation.

In Mathematics we finished up our work with finding the area of triangles, rectangles, and parallelograms.  We practiced accurately measuring heights and bases and applying the formulas.

Here is an online activity for practicing finding the area of a triangle that is plotted on a coordinate grid.  Level 1 will give only right triangles, level 2 will give different types of triangles where you might have to turn the triangle to get the base and you will have to be careful when identifying the height.

Homework:

1. Vocabulary: Sort
2. Mathematics: Areas of triangles and parallelograms worksheet
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and fill out prediction section in reading log
4. Mathematics (Due Wednesday): Bring in an empty can or box from your house.  We will be using these things for an activity finding volume and surface area.

Mr. Weis