Weekly wrap-up.

Hello blog-readers!  We had a very eventful week this week, there was so much happening.  We finished our Habitat mini-courses, created some opinion writing, started working with multiplication, sorted Legos, finished up our inquiry based electricity unit, and had our most successful group-juggle.

For the last few weeks we have been working on Habitat mini-courses.  All of the students participated in learning about and creating different habitats throughout our school.  It was so terrific to see many of you on Tuesday night for our tour, and everyone learned so much throughout this investigation.

We have begun to revisit the opinion writing genre.  We will be focusing on expressing our claim, and backing it up with evidence.  Currently students are working on stating their claim about which of our inquiries students liked the best, and are working to gather and express evidence that supports their claims. 
Students are also working on using transitional words in their writing, rather than creating a list of things they like.

In math we are beginning to work with the pattern of multiplication.  We have been using four strategies to help solve multiplication questions.  Ask your student which strategy is their favorite (mine is #4: the picture strategy).

Legos, Legos, everywhere, but only there to sort.  We are beginning a new education technology workshop and will be creating Lego robots with Arlyn.  Through this investigation we will practice collaboration and problem solving, as well as design technology.  Our first end product will be a pair of dancing birds.  The first step to creating the dancing birds is to sort the Legos systematically, and each partnership did that today.  We now have 8 nicely sorted kits, and one (mine) that still needs to be.

We are nearing the end of our inquiry-based unit focused on electricity.  Students have worked together to create circuits.  Throughout this unit we have worked on reflection and experiential learning as students have been given a list of materials and a goal, and all of them have seen success creating working circuits that incorporate switch and series power sources.  For more information check with your student, and check out the photos below!

Finally we had our most successful group juggle of the year this week!  The group juggle is one of our morning meeting activities.  We have an activity every day and they are designed to bring fun, teamwork, concentration, and cooperation to our class.  For complete details on how the group juggle works ask your student, the quick version is as follows: students are in our meeting circle tossing balls to one another in a pattern, thus far we have had 4 balls flying at once!

We had a great week, and are looking forward to the next!