Blog Posts

Happy New Year! This week in Strawberry Creek, we eased our way back into our classroom routines, resetting ourselves through thoughtful reflection.  Students shared how they felt on their first day back, what they missed about their community and what they are looking forward to this year.   To celebrate Bill Nye earning the Medal of Freedom, and to refresh our understanding of electricity and circuits, we watched an episode on electricity and then discussed devices from the episode that were powered by circuits and identified if they ran on alternating currents or direct currents. Later in the week, we played a game of “Mockups” in which student teams were given 3 randomly generated design challenge factors for who they design for, what function it must fulfill and what design constraint it must be included. For example, “design a way for 1) bus drivers 2)to keep their heads warm 3)that must be edible. For these novel design/engineering challenges students worked to create mockups with labelled drawings, noting materials and features and wrote short paragraphs explaining their design choices and functions.  Students then presented to the whole class and audience members considered possible flaws in their design ideas.  This work is in preparation for the next science project we will work on: creating gizmos that demonstrate energy through one of three ways: motion, sound or light.  ...

Winter Greetings! Apologies for those looking for the  blog post. I was mistakenly posted to our OLD page. It is still viewable through this link  and I will work on migrating all the photos to the correct site at the earliest opportunity. Thanks for your patience and please check out the blog!...

Link To Classs Photo Gallery Strawberry life continues apace, between breaks and winter cheer! In literacy, we have been looking at the plot elements of a story.  We plotted out the elements of our shared class reading book, Ban this Book, on a story map.  Then, we focused on writing realistic characters that shared some of our own identity traits by adding detail.  We then looked at the different types of conflict (internal such as person vs. self and external, such as person versus person, nature, and society).  We've been brainstorming a variety of characters to warm up for the bigger project of writing a realistic fiction story that is.  These are the prewriting stages and will be followed by the full writing process of drafting, editing, and publishing.  Most recently, we started to focus on characters and we are going to write from the first-person perspective and develop characterization to make them fully realized.  Morphology continues, reviewing the 19 morphemes we've studied deeply so far.  If your kids have been talking about the prefix, base, and suffix of words at the dinner table, encourage and engage them!...

H is for "Halloween" "House" and "Hedgehogs When diving into our sound study for the letter "H" the children engaged in a variety of activities involving literacy, art, and scientific thinking. We read the book If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen and invited the children to make a blue print of a house using cut out shapes. Once completed, they searched for matching geometric shapes in our blocks that the teachers then hot glued together for the children to paint. The multi-step construction process was exciting and satisfying upon completion....

In reading, we have been practicing summarizing by using the acronym SWBST ("someone wanted ___ but ___ so then ___."  This helps students focus on the essential elements of a story, including the protagonist, conflict, and resolution.  We practiced that by summarizing a short animated video and then we practiced it by reading the Greek myth of Arachne.  Next, students will be regularly practicing summarizing their independent reading.  This is in preparation for our next writing unit, in which we will be writing creative fiction stories.  We begin to look at plot structure as we summarize....

The school year has started off strong in Strawberry Creek!  Thanks to our returning 5th graders for modeling the Strawberry community culture, our new 4th graders were able to learn classroom procedures and expectations quickly.  For example, we use Morning Circle to greet each other and ground ourselves for the work of the day.  Closing Circle is a time for checking on homework, using our organizer, doing jobs and taking care of the classroom, and having one more check-in point as a community before we say goodbye for the afternoon.  ...