Author name: Christa Spraggins

4th/5th: Week of Jan 8

General News It was delightful to get the ol’ gang back together again following a nice, long break. We implemented a new routine to try: Tune-In and Tune-Out Tuesdays! During morning meeting, we’ll alternate between exploring an SEL power skill (Tune-IN! This week’s was “Be Kind to Your Mind!”) and musical performances (Tune-OUT! Kids can volunteer to play us a little diddy on Ms. Lorrie’s keyboard she purchased on impulse a month or so ago!) Reading/Writing Update Gammas came back from the break refreshed and ready to work hard! We needed to power through the final chapters of the The […]

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Fifth grade students study while laying on ground together at micro school.

Middle School: Week of Jan 8

Math: Da Sprouts started their new unit on percents this week. They learned a percent is always out of 100, how to model percents, and how to convert percents to fractions to decimals. As an extension activity students had to shade in a design on 9 different boxes only using red and blue. Once they had their design, they then had to estimate what percent of the box was red and what percent was blue. EverShrooms had lessons over the constant of proportionality, . They learned how to calculate from both tables and graphs. Polar Bears are learning all about

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Private middle school students collaborate while building car.

K/1st: Week of Dec 4

What’s Around Us?! This week in Alpha we learned more about Europeans that made first contact with indigenous people in North America. People have been living in North America between 13 and 40 THOUSAND years. The first Europeans to land on the continent were the Vikings and they got the idea to go west from stories they hears about strange fishermen in small seal skin boats landing in Ireland who indicated that they’d come from the WEST. The Vikings had the best technology for sailing so they set out about 1000 years ago and settled in Iceland, Greenland, and New

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Private kindergarten student proudly raises paper mache creation.

2nd/3rd: Week of Dec 4

Math – Ms. Andrea’s math group finally officially learned to subtract with regrouping! We call it: trading down. The Betas are off to a great start – so proud of them!! On Wednesday we solved many addition and subtraction story problems – with regrouping – independently and in partners. We came together at the end to explain our thinking. At the end of the week we practiced a couple of new strategies for adding triple digit numbers: using place value to break up the numbers (much like expanded form) and adding/subtracting from one number to make it easier to work

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Teachers and students pose for Winter Faire fun at community school.

4th/5th: Week of Dec 4

General News We are officially in “crunch time” to finish up projects a’plenty across all content areas. We are looking forward to putting it all together for POP in a few weeks! Reading/Writing Update We were busy bees in ELA this week with many projects on our to-do lists. We made covers for our biographies, finished up our family tree projects about the Birchbark house, and read chapter 7 and 8 of our books while completing comprehension questions and vocabulary for the book as we read. Ms. Ansley was doing reading check-ins all week so gammas were largely independent during

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Student stands beside life sized cut out of Tesla at project based school.