Cerrito’s Weekly Forecast, 1/28-2/1

Here’s this week’s forecast in Cerrito Creek, brought to you by your friendly classroom weather people, Sam and Mike.

Monday, it was raining multiplication algorithms in fifth grade math. This is one of the more important fifth-grade math skills, so we will spend a few weeks practicing, practicing. Fourth graders were rounding to estimate sums and differences and comparing their estimates with actuals. Gizmos shone through the clouds in the afternoon, as you can see in the photos below. Their design and construction require a host of essential skills for work and life, including patience, perserverance, planning, and collaboration. When something doesn’t work, many students’ knee-jerk reaction is to ask a teacher before trying to work out the problem on their own. It’s a fun project with lots of potential for student growth.

Students also began a five week unit in informational text in the reader’s workshop. Students will rotate through each teacher as they sharpen their dictionary and encyclopedia skills, identify authors’ points of view in opinion pieces, identify and use text features, and much more.

Tuesday, there is a 100% chance of MAP testing in the morning. Students will dive behind carrels to show what they know on the math section, and in a few weeks we will see what the data says about student growth since the fall.

Wednesday morning we will see more MAP weather, with the reading test at 8:45. The final language arts section will be next Monday. Thursday and Friday will return to normal schedules, with lots of gizmo time, a continued deep dive into slavery and black history, and the usual fourth and fifth grade weather patterns in Cerrito Creek.

Thursday, we announced “houses” in the third to fifth grades. The four groups, named after the elements and styled after the Hogwarts’ system, lunch together on occasion, play group games, and generally build community through fun activities. This is an effort to create cohesion and continuity in the 3-5, and students were, for the most part, willing participants. Stay tuned for photos and developments.

Students also worked in pairs today to research “Women of Hope,” which are African American women from a book by Joyce Hansen who led remarkable lives in activism, science, education, medicine, dentistry, etc. They are practicing higher order thinking skills such as comparing and contrasting, finding topic sentences, inferring information from photographic images, etc. Who know where this will lead…maybe a newspaper project. One thing is for sure: fourth and fifth-graders love social and cultural studies. Here they are sharing the headlines they wrote for their women of hope: