Dear parents,

We had a wonderful first week back to school! I hope your kids were as happy as I was to be back at Plato and in our new home! We are off to an excellent start and I know our class community will continue to grow throughout the year.

A few of our activities from this week are highlighted below 🙂

• On Tuesday we read The Porcupine Named Fluffy (yes, the story from the Flipgrid video!) as an introduction to our conversation about identity. We have been brainstorming what identity means as we’ve read other stories like Pout Pout Fish and The Day You Begin. I am so impressed with the class’s willingness and ability to respectfully discuss and deeply investigate the artwork and themes from the stories as we build our definition of identity. This morning we interviewed a partner to learn more about them. We then shared what we learned with the class, specifically sharing one thing we had in common and one thing that was unique about our partner. I love how the rest of the class kept jumping in to connect with each other with comments like “I love that food too!” This activity helped highlight how some pieces of our identity are unique to us and some are similar to others. We will continue these conversations with our upcoming novel study! Stay tuned 🙂
• It has been so much fun exploring our new classroom! We have taken the time to dig through our building materials, establish safe ways to play our board games, and find books that match our interests. We were very intentional to spend time this week playing, building, reading, and creating to become more comfortable in our new space.

 

• Throughout the week, we played various group games. Building a positive classroom community is so important to ensure each kid feels confident and comfortable sharing ideas, making mistakes, and learning together! Now, more than ever, I feel our time at school is well spent prioritizing social skills such as problem solving and cooperation. Playing games together is one way to support these social skills such as positive communication skills — plus playing together is fun!! A class favorite from the week was Captain’s Orders. I’m sure your kids can teach you 🙂 A few asked that I send the link home with the directions as well. We made a few changes to the commands and even added our own, Palm Tree!!  https://kidactivities.net/18-fun-pe-games-needing-no-equipment/

More fun from the week:

  

Please reach out with any questions or concerns! Have a wonderful weekend 🙂

Dear Room 6 parents,

It was so great to see you at conferences and celebrate all that your kids have achieved this year! Please see below for a few highlights from this week:

• On Monday we were buddies with Ms. Demetra’s class to help them practice chess as they have been learning in The Story of Pawn. It was also an excellent opportunity to refresh what we had learned last year and share one of our favorite math game choices.

• On Tuesday we started our ongoing research project for our class Culture Day (date TBD). Students are researching the African country of their choosing and making interactive presentations — attendees can make various country flags or even Egyptian arm bands to take home! We are looking forward to inviting others to see all that we’ve learned!

• On Friday we watched the movie version of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. We used a story map to discuss the progression of the book before watching the movie and discussing those key points and the many differences!

I know we will all miss seeing each other in Room 6 over the next couple of weeks, but I also know many explorations will continue at home. Thank you all for encouraging your kids to explore, create, read, and play at home!

Hi parents!

What a week! We got an excellent start to the new month 🙂 Please see below for a few highlights.

• On Monday we took our field trip to the Chicago History Museum. We enjoyed exploring the exhibits including an L train car from the 1800s, various sports uniforms from famous games, a life-size replica of Abraham Lincoln’s bed, and more. We also participated in a Chicago World’s Fair workshop where we used maps to locate various museums from the fair and real artifacts to learn about what was inside each building. To summarize our trip, each student made either a postage stamp, ticket to the Chicago World’s Fair, souvenir, etc. to highlight what was most important about the fair or another place/event we learned about at the museum.

• On Wednesday we were excited to have Mr. Dan visit again! We researched if our invention idea already exists on various websites like Amazon and Target.com. We are excited to move forward building our prototypes next week (or continue building for those of us who have already started) and are looking forward to presenting them at our invention fair next month!
• On Thursday we played a team-building game called Electric Fence. We worked together to get everyone across the electric fence safely. It was a fun way to work together and practice our communication skills and positivity.

• Throughout the week we have been creating posters to welcome our honored guests to St. Baldrick’s this morning! We had an awesome day today at the event and we are so proud of the successful service project put on by Dr. Michael’s and Mr. Chris’s students. We had a basketball shootout, danced, and cheered each other on through our haircuts! What an amazing event! Ask your kids about meeting Tommy and Danya today. I am sure they were as touched by their stories as I was.

• Today we also created model windmills after reviewing the descriptions of William’s final product. His didn’t look quite like those you’d see in most wind farms, so we made ours to look like his!

Hi Room 6 Parents,

I hope you had an excellent week 🙂 I know we did!

• On Monday we reread part of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind that mentioned Archimedes. William talks about how we don’t typically think about scientists to protect us when we are under attack, but how Archimedes was able to use the math and science of mirrors to defeat the Roman ships! We listened to an NPR segment that reviewed the details of Archimedes’ story and how people today are running tests to see if it is possible to light ships on fire using just mirrors and the sun’s energy! We discussed what could be changed for further testing to be sure the tests are accurate in recreating what Archimedes did. We then created tableaux to retell either the story of Archimedes or one group chose to recreate the the scientists who are testing the validity of the story today. Then, on Wednesday, we played a game called Mirrors. In partners, one person was the leader and the other was the mirror. The mirror tried to follow everything the leader was doing in a way that we couldn’t tell who was leading the motions! It may sound complicated, but we had fun taking turns trying to figure out who the leader was in each pair 🙂

• After analyzing The Lion and The Mouse and The Elephants and The Mice last week, throughout this week we have read various folktales from around the world! It is fun to pick out the morals and notice similarities across stories from different places. We also read a book about the Chicago World’s Fair in preparation for our awesome field trip coming up on Monday! It turns out, there are many similarities between the invention of the Ferris wheel and William’s creation of his windmill.
• On Monday we learned about SCAMPER with Ms. Neethu. Ask your kids to explain what SCAMPER is! On Wednesday we taught Mr. Dan about SCAMPER by brainstorming solutions for a problem in our class. When going to recess, Paige often finds herself running right out of her shoes! 🙂 So we each took a turn substituting, or combining, or adapting, etc. Paige’s shoes to try to solve her problem. The ideas were excellent! Even better, our critical thinking skills were put to work as we questioned each other’s ideas too. For example, we asked: how do you plan to wash her shoes and socks if they’re sewn together? These conversations and experiences have helped us grow and analyze our own ideas as we continue to prepare for our invention fair in the spring.

• On Thursday we went to Cutting Hall to see Mytholomania! I know I was laughing the whole time and it was a great way to remember some of the stories we had read in the fall — especially the 12 minute version of The Odyssey!

• This morning’s Fitness Friday got us moving! We used our fitness alphabet to spell WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA (and do the matching exercises!). After warming up for the day, we were ready to revisit our fraction stations from a couple of weeks ago. We also read a news article about a man from Kenya who invented gloves that would translate sign language to speech through a phone app. It was so cool to be able to add to our map of Africa and also make connections to Eureka! We finished the day with a cubbie clean-out and a little classroom cleaning to wrap up the week.

 

Thank you to Paige and Hawk’s grandma (or Kiki!) who donated this engine-building kit that has been fun to figure out this week!

More Cornflake Yoga!

Fake food made to look like spaghetti and milk!

Hi parents!

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful sunshine this weekend 🙂 Here are a few notes from our week.

• This week we pretended to be William Kamkwamba from our novel, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. We wrote notes to our partner in class as if we were William. We focused in particular on taking his perspective as he was digging through the junkyard for windmill supplies while the other kids laughed from the school across the street. When then exchanged notes and are writing back to William. While we have continued to add more points to our Africa and Malawi maps from our novel, this week we also made connections to the book by reading the folktale Lion and Mouse from Africa. We then read a comparable folktale, The Elephants and The Mice, from India and watched a video of The Lion and The Mouse from Aesop’s Fables. After writing and performing short skits to summarize each story, we compared them looking for similarities and differences. One similarity we found was that they all had the same moral even though they came from different places in the world.

• On Wednesday we had buddies with Ms. Lizzy’s class. We learned a new game called Multiplication Battleship!

• Although we missed meeting with Ms. Neethu this week due to President’s Day, we were very excited to meet our Eureka! mentor, Mr. Dan. He will be helping us research our invention ideas, work to create them, and finalize our presentations.

 

More fun from the week!

Hello parents,

Happy Valentine’s Day weekend! I hope you had a great week 🙂

• On Monday we picked up our conversation about fossils and everyone shared what they had learned at home. We learned about the different ways that organisms fossilize. Students then wrote in their journals about if they thought Khamba’s body could have possibly fossilized or not. This was a great way to bring our investigation full circle — from what made us question fossils in the first place to applying what we had learned.
• Throughout the week we have been adding to our new map of Africa! As different places are mentioned in The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, we are finding where they belong on our map. We are also adding various locations or notes based on our other classroom experiences — for example, we read a book titled, Goal!, about boys playing soccer in South Africa so we labeled South Africa on the map and made a note about the book. We will continue to utilize the map (and each student has an individual map they are working on labeling as well!) throughout our study of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. By using our novel to guide our geography studies (and cultural studies too), we can make authentic connections to the various map features we label.

• Also throughout the week, we have been working through various ways to understand fractions — measuring water, fraction circles, fraction bars, and measuring distances.

• On Friday we learned about the world’s cutest animals (paying extra attention to those in Africa, of course!), made beautiful Valentine’s crafts (including some festive decorations for Cornflake!), built with blocks, played a game called Ha!, and painted rocks…all in our pajamas!

More fun from the week!

Hello!

I hope you all enjoyed both the snow and the sun this week 🙂 We had a wonderful week in Room 6 filled with Queen and Beach Boys music!

• On Monday we started the preparation for the Invention Convention (coming in April!). We are calling our Monday invention classes with Ms. Neethu Eureka! There will be more details as we continue through the project. Over the coming weeks, students will be working to create their own invention to solve a problem. I cannot wait to see what creations come out of Room 6!
• On Tuesday we invited Ms. Bridget’s class to see our ice sculptures and their matching descriptions. Some of the sculptures in our gallery walk were even interactive!

   

• Throughout the week, we continued to grapple with fractions as they related to our ice hotel math problems from last week as well as our ongoing open-middle fraction challenge. Instead of memorizing “rules” about fractions or completing a whole worksheet of problems, we are taking our time working through these few questions that are really challenging us!
• We also read our new Scholastic magazine throughout the week which taught us about the “ugly” endangered animals and how they are disadvantaged compared to cuter animals. We made posters defending the aye-ayes and explaining why they are important to save as an endangered species.

• On Wednesday we read a very sad chapter of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. William’s dog, Khamba, died in the story. We talked through what happened in the story and dealt with our emotions in different ways. For some of us that meant participating in a 30 second full class groan to let our feelings out! While discussing the story, students started asking some great questions about bones decomposing and they wondered if Khamba’s bones would fossilize! We will talk about this next week, but in the meantime…your kids have homework this weekend! Please research with your child to answer the following questions: How do fossils form? Do bones decompose? We also had some great conversations about William’s feelings of guilt in the story and also the morality of the village’s chief deciding how much of his family’s food to share and how much to keep for themselves. I know I’ve said it before, but I truly love that we are able to have these difficult conversations as a class! I think it is such a great way to build relationships and practice valuable conversational skills– especially when we disagree!
• Also on Wednesday, we had buddies again with Ms. Lizzy’s class. This time we completed perplexors!

• On Friday we needed a day to recharge and mix things up! We started with some artwork for Funny Face Friday, followed by the physical challenges of Fitness Friday! Then we had some choice time, but students had to choose something they don’t typically choose. It was so great to see the creative juices flowing as things like watercolor paints were pulled out of our art center after not being used for some time. We then took some mind-bending photographs! Students worked together to come up with an idea for their illusion and decide how they would create that image in their photograph. We had lots of fun 🙂

 

A tree pose to create a tree for Cornflake!

Have a great weekend!

Hi parents!

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend 🙂 Here are a few notes from our past week.

• We were using our drama skills again as we wrote and performed skits to summarize and review what we have read in The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind so far. It’s a great way to stop and make sure we are all on the same page before continuing on in our story. This is also a great way to practice summarizing skills, build our classroom community through group collaboration, and build confidence as we each act out our various roles. We will continue to use this method of summarizing and review throughout the novel. We are also practicing our art skills by making summary pictures of each chapter. The pictures are created in groups of three students to discuss the many details of the story and be sure to include all important elements in the finished product.  
• Throughout the week we practiced our School Choice Week scarf dance. I know there have been notes in the Parent Notes emails home, but we made sure to practice the dance daily as a class reminder of this week’s importance. If you want to try it at home, I’m sure your kids can help you learn the dance too 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLtcQmk2jaA
• This week we worked on a math challenge about a hotel in Canada made completely of ice! This was a great way to tie in with our ice sculptures and our descriptive paragraphs. The article about the hotel and following questions brought up great questions about the importance of standard units of measure (“blocks” and “bigger blocks” of ice can mean different things to each individual reader for example). We also had some excellent discussions about how to use the words in the question to determine what needs to be done mathematically (times means multiply, but then we have to look at the labels in the paragraph to know which numbers we are multiplying!). I was impressed by the efforts to understand each other’s strategies, question each other’s answers, and reason if our ultimate solutions were correct.                                 

Keep an eye out for details about our upcoming field trips and our new inventions project starting this week! I’m looking forward to another excellent week in Room 6 🙂

 

Showing Cornflake some love <3!

Ms. Steph from the library visited and read us a story about moon cakes!                                        

Morning warm-ups!

< Extreme dot-to-dot!

Hi parents!

We had another awesome week here in room 6 🙂

• We have a new favorite brain teaser! They are called perplexors and they have our brains spinning! Ask your kids what color scarf each turtle was wearing and what their nicknames were. Each day, I have had students come into class asking for the next challenge level of perplexor! Also throughout the week, we have been working on our ice sculpture paragraphs and our electronic manuals. While we haven’t yet completed these projects, I know our class will have final products they are proud of.
• On Wednesday we had buddies with Ms. Lizzy’s class. In order to refresh our old relationships and/or build new ones, we took the time to simply play some games together. Some groups were reading the directions to learn how to play a new game. Other students were taking the time to teach each other one of their favorites. Regardless, groups spent time practicing valuable social skills with the added benefit of literacy and/or math/logic skills as well! 
• On Friday we we were moving all day long! We started with our Fitness Friday morning exercises. Then we listened to some popular African musicians. The electric guitar and rap musicians were most surprising to our class. Of course this great music led to a mini dance party. Afterwards we learned some African dance steps from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewqq-3xJFdI#action=share — did your kids tell you that you have homework?! We decided that we enjoyed the video so much that everyone should go home and practice the video again with their parents. It’s quite the workout! After working up our appetites, we took turns preparing mangoes and nsima (Malawian cornmeal porridge cakes) and reading books about the cultures of different African countries. While we cooked, ate, and read, we listened to music by Billy Kaunda (one of the artists William Kamkwamba listens to on the radio). This was a great day of connecting to The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind!                <Fitness Friday turned into a plank competition for some!
• Recess was full of snow games, structures, and discoveries! ^We found a snowflake design in the ice!

Hi Room 6 Parents!

We had an awesome week! I am confident your kids came home excited to tell you about all we did, but see below for a few highlights as well 🙂

• On Monday we created ice sculptures or ice festival scenes using only blue and white. Students could choose their medium and we had everything from paint to colored pencil to 3D structures…all in blue and white! The designs were inspired by one of our recent Scholastic News articles about the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in Harbin, China. We are now in the process of writing paragraphs to match each of our pieces of art using descriptive language just like the article.

• Also on Monday we created our own Mancala boards and then learned how to play the game just like William Kamkwamba played with his friends in The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind (but they called in bawo!). This is a fun game of strategy and the boards can easily be made with an egg carton and a handful of rocks. Ask your kids to teach you! It’s the perfect game for a snowy weekend 🙂
• On Tuesday we completed a note card building challenge. Some students felt very frustrated when the time was up and others felt accomplished. At various points students accused others of copying their group’s building idea. This was a great entry into our followup conversation about the many things in our lives that have been continuously improved by someone “copying” another idea and improving upon it or adjusting it to fit a different situation. I feel it is so important to continue to foster this mindset to encourage innovation and cooperation!
• Also on Tuesday we read various articles about civil rights and/or Martin Luther King Jr’s work for our country. Each group wrote and performed a tableau about the article they read. A tableau is a type of drama performance where the actors freeze to form a statue “picture.” The audience chooses one actor at a time by tapping them on the head or shoulder. When chosen, the actor performs their lines and completes their actions before returning to their original frozen position. The scene helps the audience piece together the story with a strong visual representation of the story. On Wednesday we read a different article about Martin Luther King Jr as buddies with Ms. Bridget’s class. We then answered various questions using graphs about MLK’s marches, streets named after him, and how often he used certain words in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

• On Wednesday and Thursday we explored our small electronics. Thank you to those of you who were able to donate! We started by taking apart VHS tapes and then moved on to stereos, laptops, karaoke machines, and more. Some students dove in by smashing and pulling! Others focused on one piece at a time and put some elements back together. All strategies resulted in comments like “Woah! Come look at this!” The energy in our room was beyond amazing! Students had theories about why they found something that looked like a fan or where each wire connected and why. One group named each type of wire they found (bubblegum and toothpaste wire were the two I remember!). Students who were working on different electronics were still happy to help each other loosen a screw, theorize about a new piece, or generally share in one another’s excitement. Once a group determined they had taken apart all they possibly could, they drew a diagram of how their piece (or a small portion of it) worked. Which way does each piece turn? What is its purpose? They also determined the name for their electronic. We will be wrapping up this tinkering project early next week, but my hope is that it inspired some questions about how things work. I also hope it helped students connect with William Kamkwamba’s curiosity as we continue our novel study of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind.

• To top off our week, we tried some new math puzzles to brainstorm what kind of open middle math challenge we might want to create for the school. They were both really tough and really fun!

  

• Find Your Herd and Who’s The Leader? in the gym:

Have a wonderful long weekend! See you on Tuesday 🙂