This week was one of many events. Not only did we have the highly anticipated Math Night (read more about that in the Math section of the blog), but we also had a guest artist come to visit—Jesus Sosa Calvo. Students got the chance to see the artist in action, as he carved wooden animals in the art studio while describing his process en español. This combined the work that students have been studying in Art as well as practice their Spanish skills with Erica. Cerrito Creek also started a new read aloud book, In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse by James M. Marshall III, which tells the fictional story of a mixed Lakota boy and his adventures with his grandpa. This new read aloud ties in nicely with our study of Indigenous folk tales that we are working on in Writer’s.

Students watch Jesus Sosa Calvo in the art studio.
Students listen to our new read aloud book as Rachel reads.

Cultural Studies

Students finished up their California maps this week! In addition to adding all the required map features (rivers, cities, latitude and longitude lines, etc), children also picked a specific type of map to represent such as a topographical, highway or political map. A handful of students presented these maps at Assembly on Friday in connection with our through-line question “How does access to resources shape culture?”

Vivian and Yoshi do the finishing touches on their maps.
Tess and Carson help each other out.
Cerritoberry presents their maps at assembly.

Writer’s Workshop

In conjunction with our folk-tale unit, Cerrito Creek kiddos analyzed and created story arcs this week in Writer’s. After learning about the different elements of an arc—introduction/exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and conclusion/resolution, students got together in groups of 4 and wrote collective stories following the format. We also read an only illustrated version of The Lion and the Mouse and had students fill in their own arcs based on how they felt the story developed. On Thursday, students started to create graphic novels following the arc of a story they competed in homework.

Students write collective stories following a traditional story arc.
Katherine supports a group while they work on a collective story.
Students fill out a story arc.

Reader’s Workshop

Students are in the final chapters of Island of the Blue Dolphins! We can hardly believe it. This week they practiced summarizing by following the format “someone…wanted…but…so…then…”. By following this structure, we summarized different chapters while also wrapping up the book through independent reading and group reading.

Cerrito group reads Island of the Blue Dolphins.
Our format for summarizing.

5th Grade Math

Thank you to all the families who were able to make it to math night! 5th Graders spent the majority of this week prepping for the big event. While practicing our newly reviewed division skills, students wrote their own division story problems for their parenting adults to solve, and learned a new game called the Quotient Game. Students also created rectangular prisms out of cubes and created visual maps for their family members to follow to try and rebuild. We also started a new unit on fractions, and explored using money value pieces as representations of fractions and decimals.

Noa helps her mom build a rectangular prism.
Grace and her mother write division problems together.
Sadie and Marian play games with their family members.

4th Grade Math 

Thank you all for an amazing Math Night. We were blown away by the turnout and we hope you came away just as jazzed about your child’s math learning as they are. This week, in addition to preparing for Math Night, we practiced our skills at multiplication story writing, continuing to multiply 2-digit and 2-digit numbers, and multiplying by multiples of 10. Soon we will be applying all we’ve learned about multiplication to division problems. Playing division capture is just the beginning!
Students practice making an array.
Jasper and Kian work together on Division Capture.
Jackson shows Aspen how to play the Place Value Riddle Game.
Kian’s family plays Division Capture.

Science 

Cerrito students got the opportunity to view some of Strawberry’s completed element posters early this week. Strawberry had chosen the theme of “movie posters” to direct their designs, while Cerrito started making “advertisement” style posters for their elements. Students continued to research their elements and work on their designs throughout the week, and will have all of next week to continue.

Kian and Sophie check out Benji’s finished science poster.
Rory checks out Jasper’s poster.
Jaeda researches her element.
Marian, Emme and Noa work on their element ad posters.

Additional Announcements 

  • Wednesday, November 13th — Makeup Photos Day 
  • Thursday, November 14th- Fort Ross parent volunteer training; 6pm-7pm — All parents who have signed up to be a chaperone/”officer” for the Ft. Ross trip are required to attend this training to get a better understanding of what the expectations and requirements are for our trip.