Monday, February 10, 2014

Welcome back kids! School doors are open! 

We also opened up Garden Ecosystem work in science. Today students were social scientists as they collected and began to analyze data from their garden ecosystem survey. They pored through 70 surveys from community gardeners with the goal of designing a garden ecosystem model/display. Tomorrow we will plant chard seeds to kick the first if many garden ecosystem experiments. Our 80 plants will be planted in 3 different types of soil: one consisting of a mixture with our vermiculture (worm compost), another mixture with our outdoor school compost and a generic seed starter mixture. 

Mathematicians reviewed and practiced order of operations.  Ms. Sweeny began appropriately with a word problem about playing in the snow!   Tomorrow we will check our work, practice a few more while applying order of operations to word problems.  Students are continuing to see and use variables as well.  We will look at patterns and have an assessment for their algebraic variables work.  

Readers today reviewed their book share progress and spent a day working on book share projects.  Tomorrow we will look at week 3 of our Ecoliterature cycle.  This week we will focus on main and supporting problems.  Student will also start writing plot connections to the ecology of the setting from their books. 

Writers today focused on practicing spelling patterns while getting used to our word study cycle.  They have word study work due Thursday.  This week we are focusing on r influenced vowel sounds, homophones, more compounds and suffixes.  Our opinion writing this week will focus on finding ways to craft, revise and organize evidence for student opinions.  We will soon be taking our research-based opinion skills to investigate and form an opinion on a current event.

Historians today continued to organize causes of the American Revolution in a flow chart.  Our discussions involving American Colonial ideas and British governance are include various viewpoints on fairness and taxation without representation.  Kids read about various tax acts and the Sons and Daughters of Liberty.  We discussed vocabulary words like "boycott" and "repeal".

Tomorrow we are going to share our work with pictures to represent each subject.