Elementary

K/1st: Week of 9/30

Alphas are prepared for anything! This week in Our Big Backyard… We started with ice. As ice melted we saw that it became liquid and as it got warmer it transformed into vapor! And presto! We learned the 3 states of water. We talked about how heat and cold affect the different states by speeding up or slowing down those tiny little water molecules. We created droplet art and left the drops on tables. When we came back the next morning the droplets were gone! Where did they go? Some of us thought that they had been absorbed into the […]

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A board with vowel sounds at private school in Austin.

2nd/3rd: Week of 9/30

Math – Ms. Andrea’s math group practiced skip counting by 100s (forwards, backwards and mentally),, compared SO many numbers! We used our <, > & = symbols, and practiced reading inequality sentences. . We built numbers in the hundreds and thousands using place value blocks and played a riveting game of I Have, Who Has matching place value block cards to cards with the same number written in standard form. Next we learned a new game in which we compared two numbers written in expanded form. Everyone agreed that it’s easier to compare numbers when they’re stretched out because you

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Second grade student holds reading cards at GT school in Austin.

4th/5th: Week of 9/30

ELA Update This was finally the week where we finished our novel! On Monday we had a discussion about the very exciting culmination of events in chapters 16 – 18. We also took some time to do in-class reading of the book together this week for the first time. Chapters 19 – 21 are so important for character development and we needed to know how things ended up for our characters to thoroughly and accurately analyze them. Reading these chapters aloud together in a voluntary popcorn reading was a blast because we got to feed off of each other’s reactions

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Fifth grade student points at tv screen at STEM school.

4th/5th: Week of 9/23

ELA Update On Monday we went over our P&P and discussed the novel, as per usual. There are lots of predictions flying around about how things will end up for our characters! Even reluctant readers early on in the book are finding it irresistible to weigh in on the fate of our characters by this point in the story! On Tuesday and Wednesday we used a webquest document to learn about the Salem Witch trials and the history of the idiom “a witch hunt” as it applies to the book and what happens to Kit when she is accused of

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Two fifth grade students work on math at table at micro school in Austin.

K/1st: Week of 9/23

This week in Our Big Backyard… So, Alphas knew that our Earth has layers and that they get hotter and hotter the closer you get to its center. So we acted out what it might be like to be some gooey magma deep inside our planet… Here we are…all comfy and flowing down towards the center…but wait – it’s getting kind of hot… Yeow! Get me off this hot thing! Magma gets excited and flows away from the hottest spot – but them what happens? We learned that it bumped into the solid crust layer. If the crust was too

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