October Updates

Fall is a beautiful time on CBMS campus.  We appreciated the many maple trees on while they lasted.  There has been a lot happening on team Wizards.  We had an incredibly successful team-building activity carving pumpkins last week.  There were no issues; students were safe with the carving tools, and the desks and floors were free of pumpkin guts.  Thanks to all of you who supported this activity with donations of pumpkins or by helping out during the carving.  

Math: 

We are wrapping up our second unit which explores ratios.  In this unit students were introduced to ratios, learned a variety of tools to make sense of equivalent ratios and used these tools to solve problems involving ratios.  We've been able to do a few larger problem solving tasks which is both fun and engaging.  One such task asks students to use ratio reasoning to help a kid fix a mistake he made when making his Nana's chocolate milk.  In another task, students had to problem solve to figure out which ticket price was the best deal.  Next up, we will be exploring unit rate and percentages.

After watching a video showing a kid who made a mistake making his Nana's chocolate milk, students were put into random groups and worked at vertical whiteboards to fix his mistakes.

Students worked in groups at vertical whiteboards to determine which deal was the best.  This task forced kids to use a variety of strategies to compare ratios.  

Playing the Factors and Multiples Game on a beautiful VT afternoon

Language Arts:

We are wrapping up our Identity unit this week and will begin our Memoir unit next week. Ask your child what identity markers they learned about and what connections they made to one another in terms of ancestry. Here's one example of what students did with those pictures and ancestry information you all shared. 

Students also mapped the countries of their ancestry on Google Earth so that we could make some observations about where we all came from.

Ask your student what they learned about our ancestry from the mapping activity. 

Spelling: We've been working on spelling rules related to adding the suffix -ing.  Students have learned about various syllable patterns. Understanding syllable types helps them determine what to do or not do to base words when adding -ing.  

In terms of grammar instruction, we have focused on:

• proper and common noun review
• how adjectives modify nouns and adverbs modify verbs
• pronouns and their antecedents 

Students continue to practice creative writing twice a week while also getting opportunities to practice written responses to text-dependent questions. 

Science/Social Studies: In Science, we finished our unit about Earth's systems. Students created a concept map to show the cause and effect relationship between an event (such as a volcano or wildfire) and Earth's systems. 

We have now moved on to our first Social Studies unit. Students looked at what different social scientists do to contribute to our knowledge about early humans. They are now learning about the essential turning points in human history, such as walking upright and using fire.