Monday -PE | Tuesday -O&A to Fernhill Wetlands | Wednesday -ART | Thursday | Friday -ART |
9/19--ODS packing list will be resent home with info about the luggage drop off
9/26--ODS luggage drop off (time TBA)
9/27-9/30 -- ODS Magruder
*Please contact me ASAP if you are able to help with any of these dates!*
9/20--12:00-2:15--Help small groups find success as we introduce our Fernhill Monitoring Project
10/6--12:00-2:00--We will be touring the Joint Water Commission
10/11-- 12:00-2:15--Help us place leaf packs in Scoggins Creek to survey for macroinvertebrates
10/25-- time TBA-- Help small groups find success as we collect our Fernhill Monitoring Project data
Last week we determined our expectations that we want to strive for as a class.
*Be Safe, Kind and Show Respect
*Living, Loving, Learning, Listening = Merlins
*Care for everyone and everything in our community
*Care about life long learning for yourself and others
*BE KIND --every letter stands for an amazing idea in an acrostic!
Students also received their job offer letters, hiring them for a job within the classroom. Classroom economy has kicked off! Be sure to ask them about how it works!
We also had our first, amazing visit to Nana Cardoon's to see the 4 spheres in action! There was cooking, harvesting garbanzo beans and working with Erin on the 4 spheres. And, our afternoon ended in a shared meal of a beautiful garbanzo bean stew (with beans the kids planted last year) and naan bread the kids made! A great way to kick of the year.
Ask, what are are the four spheres?
Listen to your student share about the O&A to Nana Cardoon's.
Extend the learning by walking through nature and finding sphere interactions with your child!
Literacy
We introduced a fun activity called a Power Write this week, which is a way to get our hands and brains writing without a lot of thought! And most of us finished the mircography project, which will get displayed later this week. We also used a writing block to brainstorm creative ways we could inspire the class--each kid gets a turn to lead morning meeting for a week and share interesting things with us the week they do.
For reading, we continue to read about the mystery of the Coral Queen and I plug away on reading assessments. I look forward to when we return from Outdoor School and we can focus on reading lessons as a class.
Ask, what did you like and dislike about doing the Powerwrites?
Listen to your student share about Flush, the book we are reading.
Extend the learning by reading a book together as a family that deals with an environmental issue.
6th Grade Math
Sixth graders made some major headway on learning the expectations and routines for using a textbook and accomplishing notebook expectations for our first unit on place value. There were so many wonderful skills reviewed like rounding and comparing and ordering decimal numbers. We'll actually take our first test this week. I look forward to trying some new review strategies with the class and see how it affects their confidence for the test.
Ask your student to round 3.5691 to the nearest thousandth.
Listen to your student explain the struggles and successes of dealing with a textbook and notebook.
Extend the learning by looking for ways decimal numbers are used in our everyday life.
5th Grade Math
Last week, 5th grade mathematicians received their math notebooks and completed their first lesson with guided note taking- a review of some whole-number multiplication concepts. It seemed to go well and will just get better with more practice. This week, we will begin by understanding the mathematical reasoning behind the standard algorithm for multiplication and complete review and practice of the algorithm. If all goes as I expect, we will get into the reasoning and algorithm for long division towards the middle and end of the week. Watch your child's agenda and math notebook for homework.
ASK your mathematician to show you the "long way" to multiply 9 x 27 using the distributive law.
LISTEN to your mathematician to explain how the guided notes work.
EXTEND the learning by using the associative and distributive law to solve: 28 x 37.