General News
Another great week in Delta! Remember, your child will be coming home with more P&P responsibilities this week so be sure to check in with them to make sure they’re on track to have everything completed by Monday! If you haven’t returned your tech agreement or semester supplemental log, bring that in next week. Thanks!
Reading/Writing Update
This week was all about gaining context for the world Esperanza is entering into when she moves to California in the next few chapters. We looked at the famous photo by Dorothea Lange of a migrant farm worker during the Great Depression and wrote about our noticings and wonderings. We talked economics, the Dust Bowl, the stock market crash, FDR, the New Deal, and so much more! We had a lot of curiosity for this subject – Ms. Ansley was going home and researching to find videos and articles that could answer our questions every night of the week! As we discovered what set the stage for so many people to migrate to California looking for work during this time period, we used photos, poetry, articles, videos, and interviews to explore this period of history! We closed out the week by starting a quick fiction writing project imagining a character living through this period of history.
Math Update
We started the week with a little digital housekeeping, getting everyone settled into their Google accounts and squeezing in our first Digital Citizenship mini-lesson along the way.
Year 1 Deltas journeyed through place value, traveling all the way from the billions to the thousandths. We used models, money, and standard notation to make those enormous (and teeny-tiny!) numbers a bit more tangible. We also began flexing one of my favorite underappreciated math superpowers: estimation. Being able to stop and ask, “Does this answer even make sense?” is a skill we’ll keep strengthening all year. We wrapped things up with a partner game to put our place-value prowess to work.
Year 2 Deltas continued wrangling positive and negative integers through addition and subtraction, aided by our highly sophisticated mathematical model known as “Two Girls Going to the Mall.” Ask your Delta to explain that one. 😂 We then opened our very own Integer Etsy Shop, where students designed bracelets that physically modeled integer operations. We finished the week with a team Zombie Escape Room, and I was especially delighted by how beautifully the kids worked together. Apparently, the threat of imaginary zombies is excellent for mathematical collaboration.
Theme Update
This week, we got our hands dirty with the physical geography of the United States…quite literally! We began by exploring major land and water features like mountains, rivers, and plains, creating metaphors to help make sense of what each looks like and how it shapes the land. Students then made their best geographic guesses about where these features might appear across the U.S. before consulting the map and discovering just how good (or delightfully off-course) their predictions were.
All that groundwork prepared us for two days of map-making fun. Working in small groups, students sculpted air-dry clay maps of the United States, building up mountain ranges, carving out rivers, and highlighting some of our country’s most important physical features. Once dry, the maps got a coat of paint and began looking decidedly more geographic and slightly less like colorful mashed potatoes. 😂 We also put the finishing touches on our collaborative State Pennant Flags from last week.
Next week, we’ll shift from what nature put on the map to what humans did, as we begin exploring political mapping!
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