The students are very excited about their twilight Spring Sing performance tomorrow night! This is an outdoor concert, and the students will be seated outside, watching the performance.  Please guide your children to dress according to the weather which can be chilly.   
 
The schedule is as follows: 
5:45 Light Dinner Reception
6:00 All Students to their classrooms
6:30 Spring Sing begins on Solar System 
7:30 Close
 
Ask your child what color they have been asked to wear…they know!

Also, remember that the Cerrito Year-End Performance / 5th grade Graduation is next Thursday, May 17th. 

 

Everyone needs a little more puppy in their lives…my 10 week old, Juno.
bass player extraordinaire
Talent Friday!!!
Measuring wheat grass. Dark vs. light? Soil vs. none?

Dear Cerrito Families,
Every couple of years, in the spring, we start a classroom
economy in Cerrito. We coin a currency – the “Hairy Bank Note,” this year, was the nickname trappers used for beaver pelts – and open a bank and astore. We frame it as an experiment in capitalism, an exciting opportunity to learn about decimals, economics, personal finance, and entrepreneurship. We also frame it as a dangerous move for a community; competition, meritocracy, and behaviorism are indeed part of the experiment.

The bank and store will open each Friday, and students will earn
“money” throughout the week, which they keep track of in their ledger
books, for doing their classroom jobs, turning in assignments on time,
writing down assignments, etc. They also get fined for unexcused
tardiness, a bad report from the Spanish teacher, and a variety of
other behaviors. The students will be able to buy school supplies –
nifty pens, drawing paper, colored pencils, etc. – on Fridays, and
they’ll take charge of running the bank and store.

My experience doing this in the past has been that it’s a great
project for a month. Students get incredibly creative as they open
competing stores of homemade goods, pay consignment fees to sell their wares in the class store, calculate interest, combine forces with
investing partners, etc. Some students get bummed around the idea of
fines, at first, but fear not, we will remain fair and forgiving
teachers, never striving to punish anyone unjustly. Then what will
happen at some point is that students will stop doing things out of
the goodness of their hearts (that’s normally how we operate in here),
and respond to all teacher requests with, “How much are you gonna pay me?” That’s when the store will close, and we’ll return to our
benevolent social dictatorship.

We’ve asked students to take on a job at home or for a trusted neighbor and put in an hour or so of work, so they can earn ten dollars to contribute to the overhead we’ll need to get this thing going. We suggest paying federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour)  and giving them some gardening, dishes, or other legitimate work around the house. They will then get to shop for ten dollars of art pens, mechanical pencils, and other school-related items to stock the shelves.

Thank you for your trust and support, and let me know if you have any
great ideas that connect to the store (maybe this is your professional
domain and you want to come in and talk about retail or economics…).
Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to ask your child how much they earned next week.

Homework this week:

Read for 20 minutes

REHEARSE YOUR SCENES AND SONGS!!!! HERE’S THE SCRIPT IN CASE YOU FORGET YOURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Math: 4th grade worksheet due Friday, 5th grade packet due Friday