Math:
This week the Marionettes explored and modeled the area of rectangles, triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids. The Saplings focused on sample spaces, and experimental vs theoretical probability. The Vroomshrooms learned how to solve quadratics using the square root method and by completing the square.
ELA:
We started the week with discussions about our novels then hopped back into mood and tone. The middle schoolers are deepening their understanding of how writers make very specific word choices to build mood and evoke the readers’ emotions. We used a page of text from our novels (for Marionettes that’s The Fourteenth Goldfish and for Saplings and Vroomshrooms it’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate) to box words that described the setting. After finding those, students blacked out all the other words. This is called redacted poetry, AKA black out or found poetry.
Next we looked at examples of found poetry from chunks of text in The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. After that each student picked a text–fiction, nonfiction, or poetry–and worked with a partner to identify unfamiliar words. As one clever Vroomshroom stated, “…Not knowing a word can skew the meaning of your entire found poem.” Having defined unknown words, students worked individually to circle words and phrases that appealed to them then started blacking out all the other ones. At week’s end they’re still in the process of blacking out words and illustrating their new found poem.
Theme:
Theme week focused on quarter projects this week, with students completing their Works Cited pages, and roughing out their first drafts. With the project focusing on the evolution and classification for an organism group, students have been piecing facts and figures about various living beings into a formal research report. The progress is ongoing, with reports due May 13th.
Students also completed their Creature adaptation projects, with students creating information text about various physical structures on imagined organisms. They illustrated their creatures with labels, and put together the text based on three criteria: describing the physical traits of adaptations with a name for the organism, describing its habitat and mutations for those places, and finally the future of the organism and how they may adapt to changes in their habitat from environmental issues.
With projects and classification skits set to be due in two weeks, Theme will be rocking and rolling!
AHB Community School bid farewell to Shipe Park before next year’s move to the Crestview neighborhood. Traditional activities like the whistle sprint, were joined by a final kiss goodbye at the end of our last monthly visit.
While exploring mood and tone/attitude, Vroomshrooms say two word phrases like “come on” and “let’s go” in different tones.
Top left and bottom: students work on blackout poetry. Top right: Saplings help each other define unknown words in text.
Student groups work on scripts for the Classification Skits, part of the Q4 Theme projects
After creating poems about Evolution, Delta students perform in a “SENTENCE” slam, reciting their favorite lines from their work.
