Blog Posts

This week we read Born on the Water, to serve as an anchor text in our study of the history of enslavement.   Born on the Water begins with the misstep of a well-intentioned educator: “Trace your roots. Draw a flag that represents your ancestral land.”  When asked about her intentions for Born on the Water, Nikole Hannah-Jones said that she wanted to help Black descendants of slavery in the United States craft “an origin story.” That is exactly what Hannah-Jones and her co-author, Reneé Watson, accomplish in this counternarrative to the shame Black children often experience when given this type of assignment....

  Friendly reminders: President's week break,  Monday, February 17 - Friday, 21st. February camp offered. Movement class: Every Friday. If your child likes being part of this class, please send him/her with comfortable attire; no dresses, skirts, or tights that cover the feet....

Despite the short week, science inspiration was all around us as Strawberry students gear up for their much-anticipated gizmo project! Tuesday students got a hit of inspiration from the 6th grade’s Cardboard Arcade projects. Students got to play all the games that the 6th graders constructed with cardboard, circuits, and Scratch programming, learning just how tricky it can be to make even the simplest of circuits behave as intended. Keeping in mind all the planning, designing, and on-the-spot troubleshooting that was done by the 6th graders to make their games run, will aide the Strawberries when it comes time to design their own gizmo in short time!...

Dear families,    This week we launched book clubs across Cerrito Creek and Strawberry Creek cohorts.  Book clubs allow us to build up reading skills, foster a deeper understanding of literature by reading with support from peers and teachers in small groups, encouraging students to discuss, analyze and share their perspectives on shared literature and reinforce relationships across cohorts. Students read aloud, practicing fluency and expression and engage in discussions exploring meaning and themes in literature. ...

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!...