Hi parents!

We are finally into fall weather and I believe our general class consensus is we LOVE it!! Here’s what we have been up to this week:

• Throughout the week, students have been sharing their endangered animal research projects. Students presented pamphlets with details about their animal and how we can help the species, video recorded interviews with an animal expert, video recordings pretending to be the actual animal being discussed, picture advertisements, and even a puppet show! With each presentation, we asked the question: Who cares? If this animal becomes extinct, does it matter? Although the cute animal faces make it easy for us to feel sad hearing about the endangerment of the species, we took the approach as scientists and considered the effects on the ecosystem. Ask your child how their animal presentation went and why we should care about their animal! 

• On Monday we watched The Truman Show with Mr. Chris’s class. We discussed the connection between the movie and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Each student then completed a followup project. Some learned about product placement and intentional editing to portray a message to an audience. These students then recreated the scenes they found to be most important from the movie to make their own movie trailer for The Truman Show. They also included their own element of product placement. Other students read more about the city The Truman Show’s Seahaven and the city it was based on, Seaside. These students also created their own ideal city. Cities ranged from Lemon Drop City with parks and horse trails to a city that is completely indoors. Next week we will participate in a Socratic dialogue about The Truman Show with Mr. Chris’s class.

• Students worked on their Art to Remember projects this week! Stay tuned for information about this fundraiser. We also introduced our next STEM challenge, the egg drop challenge. We will continue this next week!
• We ended the week racing pasta cars! Teams have been working with each other for the last few weeks creating and testing cars made from only pasta and hot glue. I’ve been impressed each week as students considered different options like how the steepness of the ramp can be helpful or harmful for the car or how the weight distribution can effect how the car continues or crashes when it comes to the end of the ramp. Ask your child about their car design! Ask about their successes and challenges! 

I hope you have a wonderful weekend! See you next week 🙂

-Ms. Anna

Hi parents,

We had a great week here in room 220! Take a look at what we’ve been up to!

• This week our Mindset Mathematics chapter had the class building cities based on limited views of the completed structures. Students had to grapple with what parts of the buildings were unseen and how they could still complete the city. They also considered how many different ways they could possibly create the same city that would still match the provided views. We will continue this hands-on math throughout the year. By physically creating, students are making strong connections in their brains! We will continue to use these experiences to build a strong understanding of the concepts behind mathematical formulas and processes while practicing our growth mindset.

• Throughout this week, we have been practicing finding the least common denominator between two fractions and finding equivalent fractions. Our class decided we want to continue practicing these ideas next week, but we were also very excited about our progress so far. When discussing our highs and lows of the week this morning, finding least common denominators came up as a high of the week! It also came up as a challenge of the week. I’m proud of our class for their perseverance with our fraction work! To be continued next week! 🙂
• We are loving reading and discussing The Next Great Paulie Fink together! This week we talked about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Ask your child about the cave! We broke down how symbolism is used in stories. One student compared this specific allegory to Star Wars and others asked questions about who could possibly be the shadow makers in the story.
• One of our morning activities this week was to rewrite the following sentence in your own words: I would like to study the effect of decomposition on the exocarp of Musa paradisiaca, a tropical herbaceous flowering plant, and the implications for the human peregrination. Ask your child what the sentence means! We will have more “impossible sentences” throughout the school year. We are building our vocabulary toolboxes and practicing important skills for looking up unknown words. In order to decode the sentence, students could not simply look up a word and write down the definition. They had to choose the correct definition and then make sense of it before moving along to the next word in the sentence.
• Each student has spent the last two weeks researching an endangered species of their choice. I have been loving seeing the completed products come to life and am looking forward to Monday’s presentations of their research! Student projects range from videos to puppet shows to poster advertisements and five paragraph essays. My goal is that each student felt empowered in choosing the project that best demonstrates their strengths and allows them to communicate their learning.
• Today was our last class for building pasta cars! We’re looking forward to race day next Friday! 🙂

I hope you have a great weekend! Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns.

-Ms. Anna

Hi parents,

We had another great week! Take a look at what we’ve been up to.

• Building on last week’s conversations and readings about axolotls and food webs, this week each student chose their own endangered species to begin researching. This was a way to introduce our class to independent research projects as we dig into the interconnected food webs and ecosystems. Next week each student will use their information to create a presentation project of their choosing. The project plans so far range from essays to podcast scripts to illustrations! I’m looking forward to seeing their ideas come to life!
• You might have heard that we moved the coat hooks from the hallway area to a side room this year. This move left small holes behind where the coat hooks used to be. Could we grab some plaster and cover them? Sure! Instead, we chose to look at some examples of urban art and create our own! Students were challenged to turn the two holes in the wall into something completely different. Stay tuned for finished products next week!
• During our Math Mindsets this week, students used various views of a solid to create the shape themselves using small unit cubes. Students’ brains had to flip the images of the sides of the solid in order to complete the puzzle using the provided pieces. Next week the class will create their own mind-bending puzzles with 2-D images as clues to create their 3-D solid. These challenges support mathematical thinking in a variety of ways from building perseverance to practicing reasoning skills as students explain their ways of thinking about the solid and consider other team members’ ideas as well.

• Mr. Chris practiced rations and multiple digit multiplication with the class on Thursday. He will continue to utilize Scholastic Math to explore mathematical concepts throughout the year. We ended the week combining classes with Mr. Chris to revisit our pasta cars that were being designed last week. Groups used pasta and hot glue to begin building cars they can race down provided ramps. Students will be able to choose from a few ramp setup options to see whose car can travel the farthest. We will be sure to share the race results with you! In the meantime, students are experimenting with potential and kinetic energy concepts as they consider factors like the weight of their car, the height of the ramp, and the friction of the carpet.

I hope you have a great weekend! See you next week 🙂

-Ms. Anna

Hi parents,

We can now officially check off our first full week back to school and I’m sure your kids would agree with me that it feels good to start feeling more comfortable in our classroom routines :). Here is a bit of what we’ve been up to:

• This week students practiced interview skills while getting to know one of their classmates. Each child wrote their own questions and then conducted an interview with another student in class. Looking forward, students will polish these interviewing skills in order to write the first chapter of their autobiographies which will include both an interview and a reflection. We were SO excited to start reading our class novel, The Next Great Paulie Fink, this week! The story has guided our class to discuss what it would feel like to move to a new place and who in our own families should/would be part of making that decision to move. Much of the story we have read so far is written as a collection of interview transcripts. This will serve as a mentor text when we work on chapter 1 of the students’ autobiographies. Using mentor texts allows students to try writing in different styles with the support of a text that already exists. In this way, students will use their novel to format their interview transcripts and narrative responses.

• On Monday students practiced folding paper to create different geometric shapes. After creating their shapes, partners took turns being the “skeptic” and the “convincer.” Defending their folded shape was in fact what they set out to fold required students to lean into the rules of each geometric shape and encouraged them to articulate what they knew to be true about the shapes. Our class took a special interest in squares and rhombi! Students quickly formed teams. Team “A Square is a Rhombus” vs. Team “A Square is not a Rhombus” became a heated debate! I was proud to see our class find and then present information to defend their view. Ask your child their stance and their best argument to support it! 

• We closed out our week with students writing their own weekly blog. Stay tuned! I will be sending out student blogs to each parent next week. Students are practicing executive functioning skills throughout the week by keeping up with each day’s tasks in their assignment notebooks. On Fridays, I have a mini conference with each student to review their week and touch base on any ongoing or unfinished projects. This week students started their blogs which will become a standard part of our Fridays. I am looking forward to reading and sharing these student blog posts with you as a way to hear more about your own child’s perspective of each week.

Next week we will move from planning stages to building pasta cars with Mr. Chris’s class, continue with our class novel, and apply this week’s discussions about Philotimo to establish our class norms.

I hope you have a wonderful long weekend with your families! See you on Tuesday 🙂

-Ms. Anna