LEARNING UPDATE

Families, it is smooth sailing in the Ecoschoolhouse while I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new baby girl who will arrive any day now and the Cardinals are entering the NLCS.  Below you will see the focus and upcoming learning for each subject.

Reading: Students are in a book club centered around books with a Native American theme.  We are learning about story elements this week in our Literature Journal.  Each week during our book clubs we will have a week long assignment focused on a certain reading skill.  Our reading will also impact our social studies Powwow theme which focuses on Native American culture.  These books can be used for book share work too.

Social Studies:  Historians are learning about various Native American regions.  We are focusing on the landforms and resources natives used in their daily life.  After we learn about each region with a group poster, we will start to research a Native American topics to become experts on and create a museum exhibit for.

Here links to a few videos we watched to support the natural resource to capital resource idea:

BAMBOO HOMES OF BALI

A TASTE TO CORK

PLAINS NATIVES BUFFALO USES

Writing: In writing this week, we are finally completing our I AM poems.  Students have written descriptive phrases in a poetry format to describe their personalities.  Students who finished early are investigating with iMovie as they recite their poem into a movie format. This great work will be hanging up in the hallways soon.

Math: As I hope you have seen, we are focusing on multiplication during our math time.  As a class, we have studied properties of multiplication, the power of estimation and we are starting on using the algorithm with more challenging numbers.  Students have many opportunities to practice in class and we also have extension activities and math games for those who finish their practice early.

Science:  This week in science we are reflecting upon our community experiences.  Students are finishing their notes for the 3 places that inspired them the most.   I will grade these 3 notes and scientists are using them to create wordles to represent their ideas (example below).  We will use this reflection work to guide our year long experiments and community project.  You can try a wordle yourself here:  http://www.wordle.net/

Students have also continued observing in our gardens at school.  This week Avrill and Ysana found the dark white-lined sphinx (Hyles lineata) moth caterpillar below.  Finally, Mr. K and I won a grant to buy GoPro cameras and nature guide books to help inform our observations in the future.