Elementary

2nd: Week of Oct 27

This week in Math we focused on strategies that we can use when adding numbers. After reviewing “Friends of 10” and the zero rule, we moved on to doubles and doubles +1. The aim is twofold: for Betas to understand the relationships between numbers in fact families and to develop fact fluency with addition and subtraction facts to 20 so that they don’t have to exhaust their brainpower solving smaller problems. Soon, we’ll learn to solve more complex problems and it will be beneficial for students to be able to draw on their fact knowledge or use mental math. In […]

2nd: Week of Oct 27 Read More »

Three elementary students pose for halloween picture at school with small class sizes.

K/1st: Week of Oct 27

Happy Halloween Everybody! What’s Around Me? This week, Alphas learned that it took humans hundreds of thousands of years to get to North America. They traveled on foot following food. We laid out 10 rulers. Each inch represents 100 years. The first pencil marks where we are today…the second marks 1925…the screwdriver marks 1825…the final pencil marks when the first Europeans landed in the Southwest. The other 9 and a half rulers (or 11,400 years), North America was inhabited by the ancestors of the PaleoIndians who arrived during the Ice Age. Alphas knew that humans, as well as all living

K/1st: Week of Oct 27 Read More »

Middle school students work with kindergarten student at halloween carnival at micro school in Austin.

3rd/4th: Week of Oct 20

We are so excited to have our Gammas back for quarter 2. They seem rested and ready to go! Although we are sad to leave the Vikings, our study of plants and animals is sure to be a lot of fun. We are looking forward to an amazing quarter! Math We kicked off this quarter by continuing our work on multiplication. The students enjoyed playing games to strengthen their skills this week . Gamma ones have been learning different ways to represent multiplication like arrays, area models and skip counting. Gamma twos have been honing our two by two digit

3rd/4th: Week of Oct 20 Read More »

Elementary students work with earth worms at private school in Austin.

2nd: Week of Oct 20

We kicked off our Addition & Subtraction Unit by learning about (and using snap cubes to create models of) fact families! We reviewed the commutative property of addition – it does not matter which addend comes first. We then used our sum to create matching subtraction sentences within the same fact family. On Thursday we worked so hard flipping addition problems to create groups of ten. 10 is such a friendly number to work with that once we formed a group of ten, adding the leftovers to it is easy peasy. In phonics this week we studied possessives. We learned

2nd: Week of Oct 20 Read More »

Two elementary students display math work at STEM school.

K/1st: Week of Oct 20

Compasses are cool… What’s Around Me? This week, we reviewed what’s inside us and what we, and all humans, need to thrive. Alphas learned that we are going to explore many regions across our continent of North America to learn about their resources and how people use them. We learned that ancient humans hunted and gathered their food – the technology they had came from the sun – it always came up from the same direction. The word “East” comes from an old word for dawn. The word “North” comes from an old word for “the left!” Alphas discovered that

K/1st: Week of Oct 20 Read More »

Kindergarten student paints geography at project based school.