Important announcements and events:

Thursday, Dec. 19th, 10:30-2:45- 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.

Secret Pal Gift Exchange: Next week many students will be taking part in a secret gift exchange. Those participating are responsible for bringing in 3 handmade gifts or treats throughout the week Monday-Thursday (they can pick which days to bring each item in), culminating with a used book gift on Friday. They have received a page of information about their secret pal’s likes (and allergies) to inform their gift making. Students and parents are not expected to spend any money on this exchange. Try your best to encourage your student to make as much as they can independently–this is a chance for students to experience showing kindness and gift-giving towards their classmates themselves.

Before Friday you should do 3of the following options for your pal :

  • Make a homemade craft
  • Homemade treat
  • Drawing
  • Personal notes
  • Letter or poem
  • The final gift will be a book given on Friday. Pass along a favorite book of yours (Preferably one you already have).
RAZ Kids
Your child has a new reading resource for home! RAZ Kids is an online program providing access to short stories specially curated by your child’s reading level. Each story is accompanied by activities to help your reader practice specific reading skills. Parenting adults can sign-up through your child’s account to receive progress reports as well.

Here’s what we did this week:

Cultural Studies

This week students learned a new format of note-taking called Boxes and Bullets. This tool for notes focuses in on writing down the main idea of a passage, and then using 3 details to support the main idea. We practiced note-taking through reading a chapter about Coastal California Native Tribes.

Callan, Sophie and Jaeda collaborate on writing notes about Coastal California tribes.
Carson and Charlie compare notes about the Yurok tribe.

Writer’s Workshop

Students shared their Native American myths this week with the class. Some students made graphic novels of their myths, while others told theirs orally as a way to practice the tradition! We also spent the second half of the week doing letter-writing—we practiced friendly introduction letters, such as one you might write to a new student.

Marian uses the doc cam to show her graphic novel.
Charlie tells his oral story to the class.
Students write a draft of a letter.

Reader’s Workshop

Cerrito students finished their Island of the Blue Dolphins projects last week, so this week wrote a paragraph to go along with their projects—describing their goals, processes, and outcomes. Students also practiced building their reading stamina, and exploring new books through a compiled Book Menu. Perhaps one of the week’s highlights for Cerrito was presenting their completed IOBD projects to their Buddies and faculty members on Friday.

Blackberry and Cerrito students check out Kian’s board game.
Hailey, Vivian and her buddy play Hailey’s board game, “Take it to the Island.”
Our new Book Menu.

5th Grade Math

5th graders continued their work with adding and subtracting fractions. We figured out what is a better buy when given an option between two deals, such as 6 sodas for 8 dollars, or 8 sodas for 12. During stations, students got the chance to visualize fractions, play a game with equivalent fractions, take a checkpoint, and of course, Dreambox!

Students work on Dreambox.
Students play Racing Fractions.

4th Grade Math

Fourthies started a deeper dive of fractions this week with the Field Trip Problem. In pairs, students worked to figure out which of 4 groups students would receive a bigger fraction of sandwich on their “Field Trip”. This problem had students organically applying their knowledge of fractions to divide, add, and compare fractions with like and unlike denominators. Then, they made posters demonstrating their strategies and findings that they will present to the rest of the class next week.

 

Science

This week our work with model making continued with construction of 3D models of our black box hypotheses. Students returned to their partnerships to collaborate, revise designs, and come to a consensus on their 2D models before testing out their designs with 3D materials. Given the new information that the materials provided, students revised again and came up with their final designs. Our next mystery model involved a tube, a paper bag, and water that seemed to come from nowhere. Students observed and shared their observations as a class and will begin drawing their models and explaining their hypotheses next week.

Jaeda and Vivian explore the Black Box.
Tess and her group try to figure out what’s in the box!
Emme and Kian work as a team.

Hour of Code- Scholastic

On Friday 3rd – 6th graders participated in Scholastic’s Hour of Code. Program designers from Google and Disney led our students through building and programming a Hero on the program Scratch. Everyone was super engaged and they all have accounts where they can continue the work at here at https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/c/cs-first/en/code-your-hero/code-your-hero/wrap-up-share-your-project.html

Emme, Rory and Jackson enjoy their cording activity.
Tess gets some hands-on assistance from programmers Murat and Galen.
Callan works on coding with our guest programmer, Murat.