Wizards are CURIOUS learners!

Thanks to everyone who made it out to Open House last week. It brought us so much joy to see the excitement the kids had when showing their families all the things we've been working on and learning. In fact, the purpose of today's post is to give you some specific curriculum updates just to keep you in the know! 

On Monday, we switched our Homerooms around. They will stay in these groups as we teach our first Science and Social Studies unit which also began this week. 

Before we dive into curriculum, we wanted to make you aware of the upcoming Fingerprinting Clinic that will be held at Brookside Primary School on October 3rd from 7 a.m.-12 p.m.  We hope to take a field trip or two this year and will likely be looking for chaperones.  Getting through the process of getting district approval to chaperone can take a couple of months. We STRONGLY encourage any parents who would even consider being a chaperone or volunteer at any point to start the process ASAP!  We've been told that the clinic will be easier and faster than getting an appointment with the Sheriff's department to get fingerprints done. 

Language Arts

We started our first read-aloud of the year. The book is titled The Only Road.  Be sure to ask your kiddo what the story is about. Let's just say there's "mutiny" in my room when we have to stop reading.  We are revisiting many of the reading strategies we learned last year. We've been focused on using context clues to determine unknown words since there are a bunch of Spanish words in the novel. 

Many of you also saw your child's feral writing during Open House. They LOVE this time and ask to write at other times of the day.  Our routine is that on Mondays and Wednesdays, students get the first 10 minutes of class to read their independent reading books. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they get to work on their creative stories. They are always disappointed when the 10 minutes is up. It's a good problem to have. 👍

They are using so many great "writing moves." Each time they share their writing, we celebrate what they are doing to make their stories more interesting. 

Students are also working on improving their written responses to comprehension questions related to the novel. 

Math

Our first unit of study this year is area and surface area.  In grade 6, students extend their reasoning about area to include shapes that are not composed of rectangles. Doing this draws on abilities developed in earlier grades to compose and decompose shapes, for example, to see a rectangle as composed of two congruent right triangles. Students build on these abilities and their knowledge of areas of rectangles to find the areas of polygons by decomposing and rearranging them to make figures whose areas they can determine.  They learn strategies for finding areas of parallelograms and triangles, and use regularity in repeated reasoning to develop formulas for these areas, using geometric properties to justify the correctness of these formulas. They use these formulas to solve problems. They understand that any polygon can be decomposed into triangles, and use this knowledge to find areas of polygons. 

Over the summer I took a very exciting course called "Building Thinking Classrooms" with some other math teachers here at CBMS.  It has been both challenging and energizing to implement these researched based practices into my daily lessons.  Some are very obvious to students and I have been amazed at the response to the research based practices of random grouping and completing collaborative work at vertical white boards.  The kids literally cheered today when after a few days of no work at the vertical boards we returned to them today.  We had a off day last week and the students gave me the feedback that it was because I didn't group them randomly that day.  

Social Studies 

Our first Social Studies unit of the year is Human Origins. Currently, the students in  Ms. Anderman's homeroom are participating in this unit. Our overarching question is, "What factors caused human evolution?" Throughout the unit, they will explore the major factors that contributed to human evolution. This week we watched a video as a launching point to try to wrap our heads around the vast amount of time that the planet has been around and the existence of humans in relation to to that.  Here's the video if you're curious to see the Earth's 4.5 billion-year history compared to a football field. Students also analyzed this Cosmic Calendar and created a timeline of 5 events that they felt were important turning points in Earth's history. (You can ask to see both their personal timelines of turning points in their lives and their cosmic timelines which are both on Google Classroom.)

Science

Ms. Michael's homeroom started science class this past Monday with Ms. Anderman.  With the upcoming total solar eclipse this April 8, 2024, I wanted to be absolutely sure that we did our solar system unit so we began the year with a unit to answer the student developed question "How does the solar system and its objects affect life on Earth?". Over the course of this unit, students will be asked to create a model that explains why eclipses occur so they will have lots of knowledge about the upcoming eclipse. This week we began by generating questions, created an initial model about our big question, and began to explore what makes planet earth just right for supporting life. As a part of the unit will be students figuring out why eclipses occur, I encourage you to listen to student ideas and ask questions instead of explaining why we have eclipses. An even bigger part of the unit will be the skill of modeling so if your student has prior knowledge about eclipses they will be focusing on how to create an effective model.

SEL

We finished up our unit on Healthy Friendships with skits where kids had to act out a scenario. In the scenario, one friend was offended and they had to use healthy communication to resolve the conflict. (Full disclosure, we had to revise them and try a second time because apparently it was more fun to "fight" than resolve the conflict.) Nothing like missing a critical direction. 😕 The second time around, students were able to utilize their healthy communication skills. 👏 Moving forward, our SEL time will be happening during Morning Meeting several days a week.  

You should have seen the fake tears on this one. 

Crash pads were necessary...;) 

Team Time

We played a team favorite called "Martian from Mars."  It's probably so popular because there's lots of running around outside having fun.:) You can tell by the smiles we are upholding our Wizard Value of "have fun together."