Math:
During this short week Da Sprouts learned how to convert fractions to decimals to percents on Tuesday. Wednesday they learned how to use tape diagrams and proportions to solve percents. Thursday the complete task cards to review.
Evershrooms focused on non-portional relationships this week. They learned how to represent them using verbal descriptions, equations, tables, and graphs.
Polar Bears learned that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. They used that fact to find missing angle measures and to solve equations.
Tuesday, Mountain Lizards made a review booklet for the product, power, quotient, and negative exponents rules. Wednesday they moved onto how to graph exponential functions. They ended the week with exponential growth and decay application problems.
ELA:
We spent this short week learning the elements of Shakespearean comedy since we’ll be reading one: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We also read about the setting of the play and the characters and then, to more deeply understand the connections between them, partners created character diagrams. Finally we began reading act 1, scene 1 in our “No Fear Shakespeare” translation. In this book, Shakespeare’s words are on the left page and a modern translation is on the right page. This way we can experience the words Shakespeare wrote over four hundred years ago, but we can also understand what’s happening. Interesting connections and conversations included slang throughout the decades and dowries.
Theme:
A short week became shorter thanks to Mother Nature as we had two shortened days for cold weather. Theme marched on as students outlined and gave examples of Newton’s Law of Motion. They investigated how these laws govern everything in the universe. We began by defining each law in context; students wrote down definitions and examples, and identified the precepts of each law in demonstrations both in the classroom and on video. They moved next to create “graffiti” posters for each law using annotated illustrations.
Our week ended with students creating their own analysis of Newton’s Laws of Motion by creating Triptychs, a visual representation of a concept using three side by side images the define a single concept. After some pre-planning, student creativity took off through the process, yielding some great results.
Students were also introduced to their quarter project, a research and model demonstration of a physics principle or concept. The materials for the project are available on the Google Classroom. Students were encouraged to share the process with parents to generate ideas, which will be submitted using a Google Form here.
At top and above left, Da Sprouts students work on solving problems involving percentages. Above right, Evershroom students work on building tables and graphs using non-portional relationships.
In ELA, students study characters and create diagrams to show their connections.
At top and above left, Delta students dive into outlining and analyzing Newton’s Laws of Motion, creating “graffiti” posters and Triptych drawings to demonstrate their understanding. Top right, a technical artist for Zynga games talks with Delta students about how video games are created. He was greeted with many enthusiastic questions!
