Here's the latest from our classroom:
For pictures of our Field Trip to Olympia last week,
click here. Thanks Steve Larsen for snapping and sharing some of these great shots! And thanks to all our parent chaperones, Leigh Karvasek, Lynne Varner, Steve Larsen, April Jordan, and Michael Ehl for joining us.
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| Biztown. Representatives from each table group share the prototype their group designed in a short amount of time with scarce resources. We're cracking up about the "Tech Pad," which the purple teams says is revolutionary because it uses the "Enternet rather than the Internet." One student has fallen down laughing! |
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| Friendship Lunch. Friday, students gave their secret buddy a special lunch and a note in honor of our friendship letter writing week at Grand Ridge. |
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| How Do Bills Become Laws? Students participated in a Reader's Theatre to answer that question. We also watched a couple quick films on the subject. |
Social Studies
- Wrapped up studies of WA State Government, toured Capitol Building in Olympia
- Began new unit on JA Biztown, which will culminate with our trip to JA Biztown, Kent on March 11th
- Students will apply for a job to do there. Job Apps are due next Fri., 2/18
- So far have studied four lessons: What is a Community, Economy, Free Enterprise, and Why Do I Pay Taxes?
Math
- Started Unit 7, which involves working with fractions and probability
- Worked a bit on the US traditional long division algorithm
- Please see the family letter for Unit 7 here
Writing
- We're nearing the end of unit on writing essays
- Students learned to support their thesis and supporting points with mini-stories (anecdotes), lists that have repetitive sentence beginnings (like those we studied in MLK's I have a Dream Speech), and Outside Sources, ie statistics, observations, citations, etc.
- Learned different ways of organizing our folders and then how to "cement" the entries within our folders together using transitions--be sure to ask your student about how the folders work
- Students learned powerful beginning/ending paragraph elements and put them to use by drafting a few possible intro/conclusion paragraphs
Reading/Daily 5 Time
- Students did some "Read to Someone," while reading more about Washington Government
- Reader's Theatre on How a Bill Becomes a Law
- Spent much of our time working to draft, revise/edit, and publish students' timeline projects, using the great research they did at home
