Upcoming Events:
Friday, Dec. 6th- NO SCHOOL for Report Writing
Thursday, Dec. 19th, 11:30-2:20- Asian Art Museum field trip— Students will take BART to San Francisco for an engaging storytelling tour about tricksters from different countries in Asia!
Friday, Dec. 20th, 9:15-10:15- Winter Celebration — Join us for our Winter Celebration assembly before break!
*DUE BY Friday, Dec. 20th Please complete the 15 min survey for TBS accreditation linked in“Requesting Your Input” email sent Dec 4
This week in Cerrito Creek…
Island of the Blue Dolphins Projects
Refreshed with new energy from the break, Cerrito students put their noses to the grindstone to finish up their end of novel projects. Our classroom may look like a tornado has just passed through, but the room has been buzzing with activity. This was our students’ first foray into planning an open-ended project from proposal to product and are brimming with pride at their results. Everything from clay to q-tips, natural items sourced from their backyards and even a bit of Rosie’s bedding (clean of course!) went into these projects. We can’t wait to show them off. Stay tuned for pictures!
CerritoBerry 4/5 Math
This week 4th graders jumped into fractions with both feet when we had a joint CerritoBerry 4th/5th math day. 4th graders got time to explore a new math tool – Cuisenaire Rods. They organized and reorganized them by different features and made observations. Meanwhile, 5th graders reviewed together their ‘Show Me One Half’ packets from the summer that they completed with the Cuisenaire Rods. Then 4th and 5th graders came together in trios and the 5th graders got to be ‘experts’ and taught the 4th graders how to use the new tool in the packets. Teachers worked with small groups of a few trios to support understanding. This was the first day of a new weekly cross-grade math lesson where students will team up to practice discrete math skills, share thinking, and learn from each other – just another benefit of combined grade classes!
Science
We are forging ahead in science to investigate another mystery – the black boxes. In pairs, our scientists needed to rely on different senses (hearing and feeling) to determine what obstacles in the box were in the way of a marble that they couldn’t see inside the sealed black box. They used their observations to draw a model that explained what they heard and felt. Similarly to the Mystery Tubes from the beginning of the year, scientists use models to explain a phenomenon that cannot be directly observed. They shared out their first drafts, made observations of similarities and differences with the other group that had the same box orientation as they did, and are preparing to conference and revise their models one more time before attempting to build it in 3D next week!
Writing
This week our writers practiced their editing skills, finished their graphic novels, and celebrated the publication of their first Chanterelle magazine of the year! We have been digging into what makes a complete and interesting sentence. What better place to look for sentences like that than in the books we love so much? We used our own SSR books to practice picking out subjects and verbs to play Sentence Smackdown. Graphic novels are still a favorite in 4th and 5th grade so we made our own, transcribing Indigenous oral folk tales and adding illustrations to each frame after mapping out the arc for each story. Lastly, students each received their own copy of the first Chanterelle of the year. This first volume is a collection of their memoirs. Did your child bring theirs home to show you? Ask them about it!
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