Readathon next week! Remember to bring in books for the swap.

Jigsaw Learning

We are increasingly using an instructional strategy in which students read different texts, then share out from what they read. In effect, they become teachers of each other. The cognitive load, so to speak, shifts to students as they must summarize and synthesize their learning for their peers in understandable terms. Below, among the gorgeous tulips and baby’s breath, students read about Frontier Schools and African Americans going west, make posters, then teach each other. Monday, we did the same with a Plains Indians reading. Later this week, we will explore black exclusion in Oregon. It was a white persons’ paradise where African Americans were forbidden from owning land, so most African American pioneers headed south to California.

The Environment as Teacher

A bunch of great books grace the shelves of the reading nook to give students more nonfiction reading options for SSR. A student of Iranian descent shares her family’s Nowrooz traditions with an altar. She presented on Monday.

New Playground!

After many months of construction, Cerrito students are thrilled to stretch it out on their shiny new playground in Strawberry Creek Park. Now for phase two: the bathrooms.

Homework

Science

Take a look at the night sky! Record the moon and any observations you have in your science notebook.

Math

• 4th grade worksheets due Wednesdays and Fridays
• 5th grade packet due Friday. 2 pages most nights.

Reading

• 20 minutes, at least. Extra points if you visit your local library and can prove it!

Writing

• OT scenario!

Word Study

• Wordly Wise
• Spelling

Scenario for Tuesday Homework:

Scott’s Bluff

(2 miles northwest of Gering, Nebraska)

Mile 596

June 6

You’ve had a good day of travel. And everyone enjoyed hot buffalo
and root stew around the campfire. It’s a balmy starry night. To
celebrate the nations’ birthday, the elders tell the legend of Hiram
Scott, who is presumed to have died right here after being abandoned
by his travel companions. But that’s not the strange part…

(Listen up, this is one of

 the west’s TALL tales)

The Legend of Hiram Scott…

It is said by many-a-storytellers, that ’round-about the autumn of 1826, our man Scott became ill. You
see, this mountain man was traveling with his companions, Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, William
Sublette and Thomas Fitzpatrick, who all worked for a fur trader named William Ashley. They were
returning to St Louis.

While they all were camped at Laramie’s Fork, which is a small tributary of the Platte river, some 60 or more miles west of this-here bluff, they had a mishap with their canoe and drowned their gun powder. These men could no longer hunt. While they waited for Scott to get well they searched for edible roots and berries to stay alive. While hunting for fresh fruit they came upon a trail of “white men” that had just recently passed these parts.

What was to be done? they asked. They thought that if they were able to overtake this group they could get help and reach the “settlements” without starving to death. They were too weak to carry Scott and were also afraid to wait that they might perish as well. They decided to abandon him to his FATE. While pretending to go out for food, his companions left him.

When they caught up with the strangers they tell of Scott’s death due to illness, something they believed was doomed to happen to him quite soon anyway. The following summer the mountain men take the trail up the Platte River to their annual rendezvous in the mountains.

So the story is told, they were horrified to find his remains some sixty miles from where they had left
him the year before. His bones and “grinning skull” were found at the base of this high bluff which has since been named after him. Some stories even tell of his bones being found a-top this very bluff.
Believe it or not!