Announcements
- This week’s out and about will be in the school garden. We will use our time there to start researching our inquiry questions (based on the wonderings that we did last week).
- In observance of Veteran’s Day, we will not have school this Thursday, November 11th. However, there will be school on Friday, November 12th.
- Please talk to your student about what fidgets they are choosing to bring to school with them. We have had conversations with students in both classes around these. The fidgets students bring to school need to be small enough to use without being distractions to nearby students, and cannot be toys (cars, stuffed animals, skateboards). Please ask them to leave toys and overly large fidgets at home.
Project
Last week in project, we sealed up our bean mazes and set them growing. We also ventured back to the garden to think about what we wondered, and thought about which of these wonderings we could answer with some inquiry-based research. We spent some time thinking about how graphs can show how different things change over time, and made some of our own. On Friday, we got a letter at our Merlin Valley farms that explained that gas prices were on the rise, and that we would need to pay more for gas if we had a truck or a tractor.
Ask your student how the rising gas prices impacted their farms.
This week in project, we will continue to consider how to best manage our Merlin Valley Farms, and move into thinking about the impacts of our resource use on the systems in the Valley. We will also make a plan for how we can find an answer to our inquiry questions in the backyard garden. Lastly, we will create our Geek Out Presentations this week so that next week, we can present our findings.
Literacy
In Literacy last week, we finished our Poetry Anthologies by printing out the poems we wrote, and attaching them to handmade book pages. We spent some time reciting our poems and poems from famous poets, and we did fire-writes to practice allowing our ideas to flow out through our hands and onto a page. In reading, we continued to reflect on our good fit books with some whole-group updates and book reflections. We also continued our Pax read aloud, learning what Pax was named after, and getting a glimpse into what the main character’s father is up to.
Ask your student what part of their anthology they are most proud of.
In Literacy next week, we will begin preparing for spelling and writing homework by completing spelling pre-tests, and learn some new strategies for brainstorming (*secret word*) writing topics. We will also continue to reflect on what we are reading by using our new red reading journals to explore the different characters in our stories, and find quotes that stand out to us and explore why they are important.
5th Grade Math
Last week in fifth grade math, we delved into decimal division. We started the week with a conceptual, visual model for decimal division using a place value chart. Then, later in the week, we related this understanding to long division.
Ask your student to show you how to complete a whole number divided by a decimal number equation. Does your student prefer the conceptual model? Or to use long division?
Next week we will be engaging in review of our decimal unit, then we will be taking the end of unit assessment.
6th Grade Math
In 6th grade math last week, we reviewed the ratio diagrams that we learned throughout the first half of module 1, and continued to practice plotting the values from ratio tables on the coordinate plane. After that, we spent some time completing the Mid-Module Assessment, and catching up on work that we missed in the first half of module 1.
Ask your student which ratio visual is their favorite, and see if they can show you how it works.
This week, we will begin to shift our understanding of ratios to a new topic: rates. We will learn what a rate is, and how to find its simplest form. Then we will reverse the shift and use rates to deepen our understanding of the relationships within ratio tables. The reason that we shift this back and forth is so that we can re-engage what we have just learned in solving a new type of problem. This helps us to retain what we know about ratios longer and use that understanding when faced with a new type of mathematical challenge.
Social Emotional Learning
Last week, we started a new series of lessons in social emotional learning related to microaggressions. We talked about some examples of these that we might hear at school, and built our own definitions of the word. This week, we will continue to talk about how our words impact people around us, and what we can do to ensure that all members of our community feel welcomed and safe.