First Day: First Writing Prompt of the Year!

In Reading and Language Arts, our class began the year with our first novel,  “The Island of The Blue Dolphins” . We unpacked life on a remote island off the coast of California, established common nautical terms, and confirmed our understanding of various literary devices like Foreshadowing. We dove deeper into our text with a personal and analytical response entitled, “Connections and Comprehension Questions”. This gave each one of us an opportunity to confirm events and character developments within the early stages of our tale. Our class launched their Writing Journal prompts with crafting a 5 Paragraph essay entitled, “My Summer“.  We established a 5 component, Class Writing Rubric for an agreed writing standard. Our class scored our own prompts and we discussed why we may have missed the mark from achieving the maximum 5 points.

Our Multi-Class “Chain of Interests”

Chalkboard Questions of the Week (Most Common Student Responses)

– What 3 Words Best Describe You? (Nice, Friendly, Creative)

– Do You Like Being Alone? (Sometimes)

– Do You Prefer Hot or Cold Weather? (HOT)

– What US State, that You Have NOT Visited, Would You Like to Explore? (CA, NY, Hawaii)

In Social Studies, our class explored a Storyworks article entitled, “History of Fun” and we learned about the beginning of playgrounds and sandboxes; how they gave kids a place to be social and have fun without getting hurt as often. Our class used this article as an opportunity to write an Interpretive Summary in our Writing Journal. Each one of us provided 3 facts from our reading and supported these facts with our own analysis and reasoning. The entire upper grade classes collaborated on building a paper chain linking each one of our 3 “I Statements” with fellow classmates that had similar connections to our topic or interest. We began our first Geography Challenge as we journey around the USA and learn about our 50 States and their capitals. Each one of us reviewed or heard for the first time all 50 states, their locations, and also the name of each capital city. Our academic adventure this school year will be encompassing US History.

Mindful Meditation

In Science and Math, our class reviewed and explored some interesting topics this week. Math Challenges: everyday our class is presented with a handful of problems that may be review or pushing our knowledge of mathematical skills. This week’s topics were : Order of Operations, Multiplication, Area of a Rectangle, and Converting Measurements.   SuperSTEM: “Welcome to Mario World” taught us about engineering, technology and designing a theme-park ride that models itself after one of the most popular video games of all-time, “Super Mario Bros.“ Natural World; Our class viewed, studied and discussed two different flying creatures: a very large hawk perched on power lines right above our heads and also a small, deceased bat on the sidewalk. We posed so many questions: what happened to the bat? Why is the hawk looking at us? Is the bat small or is that the right size for the type of bat? Is the hawk looking for prey?

Discovering Our Natural World