General News
We made it through testing week! We then bid a temporary farewell to Ms. Lorrie on Thursday with a walk to Little Deli for pizza and to celebrate our hard work with the first round of testing. We know things won’t be the same around here without Ms. Lorrie, but are so happy we can support from afar by giving her the time to focus on healing after all she has done for us.
Big thanks to Anne (Henry’s mom), Alexa (Andrew’s mom) and Christa (Stella’s mom) who singlehandedly took care of the entire pizza process–from ordering, paying and delivering–so that our pizza lunch could be a success! 🥰
ELA
It was a weird week because of testing, but we managed to squeeze in two ELA classes into our afternoons for each grade. On day one we went over our P&P, as usual, and had a discussion about the book. We are working on some niche grammar skills right now and it has been a fun learning experience! Things like present perfect tense and prepositional phrases are not important to have memorized right now, we are just letting them wash over us for exposure at this time. On the second day of our ELA block we were able to dive into our Mars colonization discussion more. We analyzed a simple story for push/pull factors in migration to another planet to prepare for writing our own creative short stories about the same topic. We also took a fun quiz to see if we have what it takes (ability to stay in cramped spaces for a long time, willing to leave friends and family behind, etc) to be intrepid space explorers ourselves! Next week we’ll do a quick round of creative writing with this concept before we switch gears to preparing to write persuasive pieces.
Math
We didn’t get a lot of math time this week, but we managed to squeeze in a little number crunching. Ms. Amanda visited Year 2 students to watch their amazing algebra skills shine! (This will help as she plans her curriculum for next year!) Year 1 students embarked upon a challenging geometry project: building nets on all 4 quadrants of a coordinate plane (usually a 6th grade skill) and then finding the area/perimeter of each side. Then, they assembled their nets and found the total volume for their polyhedron! Next week, we’ll get to cover the new topics we really didn’t get a chance to explore much: Geometry for Year 1 kids and Volume of Prisms/Pyramids for Year 2! Ms. Jessica is ready to carry on these topics next week!
Theme
Theme was cut a little short this week, as well. Deltas turned in their project outlines and saw examples of demonstration projects that meet the criteria for this quarter’s independent P&P assignment. Students explored the rock cycle (different types of rocks) and did a hands-on partnered rock identification lab at week’s end.
Ms. Lorrie was too busy being in denial to take photos this week but we got some good ones at our pizza lunch (Thanks, Ms. Alexa!)
