Monday P.E. | Tuesday In and About: Symposium Project | Wednesday Art | Thursday Rehearsal | Friday All School Meeting |
Calendar Highlights
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For any interested families, Merlins will be one of the groups sharing their learning at the all school meeting this week, Friday the 13th from around 9:30 to 10:30 am.
I also may be sending your student home with homework that is different from routine. This means that your student may come home with a Sustainability Symposium, Nature Adventure, or Council of All Beings packet instead of their usual homework, and we will adjust what they write in their agenda and get points for accordingly, so that they are not stuck with a heavier homework load. I appreciate the flexibility and understanding in this, as we have a few irons in the figurative fire this month with culminating projects.
Literacy
For reading, Merlins continued analyzing their nature adventure books. They continued to focus on perspective, and spent some time rewriting an event from a different narrative point of view. This has prepared them for their next meeting on Monday, where they will have a chance to exchange opinions about the book and its narration.
For writing, Merlins did some creative exploration into the being that they will step into and write from for our final writing project of the year. In The Lorax (a crowd favorite around here) the Lorax comes to speak for the trees because "the trees have no tongues." In a similar fashion, we will be speaking for other beings (*secret word*) to practice perspective taking, and informational and narrative writing. Last week, to get acquainted, Merlins made a storyboard about their being, wrote some fire writes, and started to outline their first paragraph. This week, we will get explore some examples and start typing.
Ask: What being did you choose? How does that being see the world? What will you say to your readers speaking as that being?
Project
For our all level out and about, we visited the bridges in Portland and got a tour of sustainable transportation methods that the city of Portland has established over the years. Students rode in the aerial tram and walked over the OHSU sky bridge; the longest suspension bridge of its type in North America! Students also had the opportunity to walk across the Tilikum Crossing Bridge and the Hawthorne Bridge, and observed and discussed the unique sustainable features along the way. In class, students began brainstorming a “How Might We” question to tackle for their Sustainability Symposium. They are working toward solving a sustainability problem that the community of Forest Grove faces, and they will be designing and engineering a tool or solution to the specific problem that they chose to focus on. Students have chosen topics ranging from food insecurity, pollution of water, and sustainable transportation.
Ask: How is the Tilikum Crossing Bridge different than other bridges in Portland? What kind of transportation methods are aloud on this bridge?
Extend the learning: Click here to read more about the history of the bridges in Portland!
5th Grade Math
5th graders began the week by practicing the give and take method and applying it to more complex decimal numbers when adding and subtracting. Students also began multiplying and dividing decimals by 10, and they observed and discussed patterns that came up when multiplying and dividing decimal numbers by 10. Then we moved on to exploring the powers of ten, and students were introduced to exponents and exponential notation.
Ask: Which way does the decimal point move when we multiply a decimal number by 10? Which way does the decimal point move when we divide a decimal number by 10?
6th Grade Math
This week in sixth grade math, we did a review of measuring with a ruler down to sixteenths of an inch, and then did a short review of block 3 before heading into the block three test on Thursday and Friday.
Ask: how many (unsimplified) measurements can you tell me that are equivalent to half an inch?
Extend the learning: challenge your student to a measuring contest! Measure everyday objects (they each have a ruler bookmark in their agenda) like the bottom of a cup, a roll of toilet paper or a quarter to the nearest 16th of an inch. See who can be the most exact in their measuring.