Hi parents,

Thank you for coming out for conferences this week! It was great to see you all! There was a mix of nerves and excitement while students prepared for their meetings. I hope you enjoyed the work your child chose to show you. I am very proud of all the efforts they put into preparing for their conferences. Here are a few other things we’ve been up to this week.

• We did it! Our first Battle of the Books competition! Students competed on Tuesday answering three rounds of questions about the books they read. We were very impressed overall with the level of competition. Many groups answered only a few questions incorrectly which kept the close competition exciting and truly anyone’s game! Most importantly, we were impressed with the students’ preparedness when answering the questions. Thursday we held the finale for the top three teams. We were at the edge of our seats when we had to go to a tiebreaker round and the teams were back and forth until the very last question. Great work, teams! I am looking forward to many more Battles of the Books at Plato Academy.

• Last Friday we completed our class novel, The Next Great Paulie Fink. This week students created a summary project of their choosing to present to the class. We had book jackets, comic strips, mini museums, and a Blooket quiz. I enjoyed the creativity each student demonstrated while highlighting the most important pieces of the story. Stay tuned for our next novel study!

• I think the cold and snow this week felt more like December than November because we sure were in the holiday spirit! We did some planning for our school holiday show. We also started making our ornaments for the Plato tree for the Des Plaines tree decorating event.

Thank you again for coming to support your kids at their conferences! I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving break with your families.

-Anna

 

Hi parents!

The blog post might be short this week, but I can assure you it is not because we were taking it easy!! This week we spent much of our time preparing for conferences. Your kids are excited (and maybe a little nervous!) to show you the work they’ve been up to and talk you through their successes and goals. They’ll be great! I’m looking forward to seeing you all next week!

• I was out for most of last week, but did want to share a few Halloween pictures from that Monday :). We did a Halloween math challenge, discussed what a catalyst is and then made devil’s toothpaste. We made ice cream too! Next week we will complete our followup experiments relating to devil’s toothpaste. Stay tuned!

• This week, in addition to our conference preparation, we revisited our discussion about volume. Particularly we are grasping the concept of empty space inside a box. Students practiced calculating volume, finding the volume of the empty space in a rectangular prism, and creating boxes to allow for the least possible empty space. We’re still grappling with the concepts and will be continue with them in the coming weeks.

• Also this week students worked on two different chapters for their autobiographies. We may share some of these with you at conferences, but we may also want to keep some element of surprise for the final autobiography!
• We ended this week reading the end of The Next Great Paulie Fink AND completing our first practice round for Battle of the Books! The ending to the story really had our energy up with surprises and some comments of — “I KNEW it!!!” Your kids did great at the practice Battle of the Books competition! I’m looking forward to the official competition next week 🙂

I hope you had a wonderful week! I know we did. See you all on Thursday/Friday!

-Ms. Anna