General News
Teacher appreciation was such a delight! The heartfelt video messages were really touching and went a long way to help us feel loved and appreciated. (Extra special thanks for the delightful sit-down lunch, with coverage! We love the chance to dine with our fellow staff members!)
The Gammas spent our Community Meeting brainstorming new ideas and suggestions for next year. If you are curious about their feedback (or would like to add your own?) you can do so here!
ELA Update
We’re at the part of the school year where things get a little wonky and we blend the classes more often to take care of little odds and end tasks. On Tuesday we analyzed free verse poetry for style and theme. It was such fun to discuss in depth! On Wednesday we lost a little ELA time this week to brainstorm suggestions for next year, math assessments, and on Thursday we began boxing up our library! While Gammas put their new poetry skills to work with writing poetry in their preferred style of four we’ve focused on (concrete, haiku, blackout, and free verse) they worked in 15 minute “shifts” to box up the ~24 boxes of books we need to move our massive and wonderful library. Gammas were eager to participate in this process and proved themselves to be hard workers with great spatial skills and a strong knack for tightly packing a moving box!
Math Update
Have you heard of the very high-end pitbull named Zipper Wonka? Well, he is quite the investor and would love to fund the kid’s movie theater designs but for a price: the Gammas must design Zipper Wonka a luxury VIP room including many fancy features for a discriminating shelter pup. We’ve had tons of fun using our math skills to make this project come to life! First, the kids are using a web-based architecture program to ‘design’ the room. Next, they will select furniture and accessories from their “Luxury Pit Bull” catalogs. Finally, they will calculate square footage and select flooring (again–only the BEST for Zipper Wonka!) In addition to all this math attacking, we also busted out of end-of-year check-ins and tackled a hands-on artsy angle-measuring activity using colored masking tape and protractors. Kids learned 2 new math partner games that we plan to offer on the “math buffet” next year for fast-finishers/brain breaks. It was a delightful week in math across the board.
Theme Update
We were so excited to see the kids’ final human body systems at-home projects come in on Monday. Excellent work! (We will be polling students and parents soon to feel you out for this type of at-home project: are you a foe or fan of this kind of crafting?) Kids presented their posters to the class and it’s been great to see so much creativity flowing! We spent Monday creating handmade “assets” and then scanned/populated a folder of kid-made-digital art so the different body systems groups (from individual projects) could team up to make a cumulative informational video explaining their body system to a larger audience. We are using an app called Explain Everything (the same one Ms. Lorrie uses for teaching) and the kids are creating really lovely videos in record time. Our goal is to have these ready for POP! (It’s a lofty goal, but it COULD happen!) Next week, we will start brainstorming for POP committees–a Gamma tradition that makes POP prep collaborative and less overwhelming. We love our Gamma POP planning!
| 
| 
|
|---|---|---|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
|
| 
|
