JA Biztown Field Trip: Students were amazing at Biztown. The worked hard and most were exhausted by the end of the day. Ask your student about their job and how it contributed to the overall success of the Biztown community. Thanks to all our amazing parent volunteers, without whom this great simulation would not have been possible. Check out pictures here.
Social Studies:
- This week students worked in business groups to complete activities in preparation for their trip to Biztown.
- Students wrote and designed a classified newspaper article and the copy for a TV advertisement
- CEOs filled out business paperwork including a loan application and promissory note
- Students visited Biztown on Friday to culminate their study of Economics.
- Next week students will debrief their Biztown experience, play a Jeopardy review game, and take their final assessment.
- On Monday, Mrs. Oakes, our school nurse, came to our classroom to continue our discussion of nutrition and health.
- Students conducted a probability experiment where they dropped a small cube on to a colorful board. They designed the board, made predictions about the expected number of times the cube would land on a particular color, and recorded data on 50 drops of the cube
- We found that with probability, the more times an event occurs, the more closely our results will come to what we expect. Ask your child what happened when we used a computerized spinner to spin 1 million times versus just 100 times.
- We finished up Unit 7 and took the unit assessment
- Please find the family letter for Unit 8 here
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| Dropping Cubes. Probability experiment in process. Only 49 more times to go! |
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| Tallying up the results. |
- Students have been working very hard to finish up publishing of essays and their stationery
- Many students and I have met three separate times through the revising and editing stages
- We'll have the Author's Chair celebration early this coming week and move on to fictional narrative writing
- We finished the science field test on our second and final unit--Matter
- Over the three lessons, we conducted a variety of different hands-on experiments where students learned about the properties of solids, liquids and gasses, and also that matter is conserved in terms of weight and volume.
- Conserved means that no matter the shape of the container, if we pour some liquid from one to another, we'll have the same amount of liquid
- This also means if we shape clay or other objects in different ways and measure the volume or weight--they will always be the same (so long as no matter is added or removed)
- This was not as intuitive a concept as you might think, and students confronted their preconceptions head on through these experiences
- We also did some great reading about states of matter, the story of Archimedes discovering how to measure volume with liquid (be sure to ask about that story!), and properties of matter
