Language Arts
“Kid, you will move mountains” -Dr. Seuss
There is no better way to celebrate literacy than acknowledging one of our kids’ favorite authors and illustrators, Dr. Seuss. This week, we spent time reading some of the classics of children’s literature. Dr Seuss’ books always provide us with wonderful opportunities to not only play with words and creative illustrations, but also opportunities to think beyond the text and dig deep understanding the profound and powerful messages of his writing. The thinking strategies we practiced were Asking Questions and Making Inferences. Students did a marvelous job sharing their favorite quotes with the class!
Another fun activity we did this week to reinforce inferring skills were Adivinanzas. Adivinanzas (riddles) are a central part of Latin culture. Students were very accurate figuring out the text clues and thinking figuratively and literally to solve the riddles. Great job!
Book club update: Students are doing a great job keeping up with their reading assignments both, in class and at home. By Friday, they were expected to have read up until chapter 12 and filled out the corresponding logs. Next week we will be working on an activity that requires to have completed these parts. They are also encouraged to reread some chapters to be better prepared for the discussions.
We culminated our week having a very interesting discussion about the presidential candidates. We adults can learn a thing of two from our thoughtful children. The work ethic and respect that these kids show is absolutely outstanding. They are able to articulate their opinions in the most professional manner. I cant wait to see them put this knowledge and wisdom into practice when they write their persuasive essays next week!
Some of the grammar and word work included:
- Rules to form plurals in Spanish
- Accurate use of capital and lower case letters.
- Comparatives and superlatives (adjectives and adverbs).
- Spelling sentences
Students took home their new spelling sentences. As usual, we will have our Dictado on Thursday.
Science
Continuing with investigation 3: Water Tolerance , students isolated one factor, water, in the environment of plants, and set up and experiment to determine the range of water tolerance for the early growth of four different plants. Each student became an expert of a type of plant and had to follow their development very closely and share information with their groups. Based on our observations and our previous investigations we continued to discuss: what are the optimal conditions for each of four plants: corn, wheat, barley, and peas? What changes in the plants could they observe had taken place over the weekend? Over five days?
Students took home a new science book this week, Adaptaciones. Make sure your child practices his/her reading on a regular basis.
During this investigation students:
- Described the optimum water conditions for early growth of seeds.
- Analyzed data from plant experiments.
- Input information on data sheet.
- Checked their predictions.
- Compared and contrasted factors as well as plant growth and preferences.
Math
This week we dove deeper into algebra. The students did an excellent job of it and enjoyed the process as well!
In math your student should now be able to:
Looking for extra practice? Check out this site: Algebra
History & Geography
We started our unit on the westward expansion this week, read about Daniel Boone and Sacajawea, as well as early transportation and native Americans. On Friday the students did a phenomenal job of presenting their Feudal Japan projects that had been created at home during the week. Thanks again for your support with these amazing projects!
Art
In 4th/5th grade art, the students started an Origami Radial Symmetry project. The students learned how to make 4 different Origami folds, and then made 4 samples in 4 different colors, of each fold. These will be glued on 12″ square paper to create a design with radial symmetry. We’ll continue this project next week, but check out Connor’s great design which he finished in one class! Great job everyone!
Music
Sr. Kit told some stories about his musician friends in Ecuador, and about the clothing donated here last year which was distributed to a large family whose mother is facing s serious illness.