Vote Tuesday!

Check out the amazing posters Cerrito students made and Erica put up in Fruitvale! Spanish meets direct action civic engagement!!!

Upcoming Events

• Math Night is Thursday, from 6 to 7:30. 5th graders will be in Cerrito Creek, 4th graders in Strawberry Creek for a student-guided experience that will give you a window into their math learning at TBS.
• The 4/5 Feast is next Thursday, 11/15, from 12 to 1. Each student will be responsible for bringing in one ingredient, stone soup style, for the banquet. Students will cook, you will shop, and we will all dine together. Grandparents in town for Grandfriends’ Day are welcome, as are siblings, and of course, parents. The menu is autumn vegetable chowder, persimmon/pomegranate salad, and baguettes.
• Tahoe is on the books!!! May 23rd-24th, 2019. We will depart at 8 on Thursday return by 4 on Friday. Many more details to come. It’s a sleepover, all parents are invited, make it if you can!

I made a Spotify playlist of all our Cerrito sing-along songs, and I’ll add to it as the year progresses. I know the students will be interested in listening to the original versions of these tunes as you move through life…

Halloween is a big deal at TBS, with spooky science hosted by the eighth graders, candy math in 5th grade, a parade, and various language arts activities with ghastly themes. The photos above show the excitement of it all and the necessary aftermath. Thursday was one of the rare days in which the students were more exhausted than the teachers.

 

In the candy math activity, students had to categorize the wrappers of the candy they consumed – our picked up off the street, in one student’s case, which I thought was a creative way to make healthy choices and get your homework done! – and calculate landmark number data, including mean, median, mode, and range.

 

You can also see the students reading the scary stories they composed in writer’s workshop. The way that worked was I cut up a classic not-so-scary story called The Viper and students had to use context clues to put it back together in the correct sequence. Then, they had to add descriptive language and dialogue to beef it up. Students took the story in various directions, from goofy humor to the macabre. They loved the share out.

 

Cerrito presented our social justice and civic engagement work at the assembly on Friday. We have taken a deep dive into migration already this year, defining the many kinds of people who move, looking at push and pull factors, and connecting the stories of people we know who have moved to historical and current day immigrants. Lately, we have been looking at voting, for obvious reasons, and the ways in which certain voters become disenfranchised. We partnered with our fantastic new Spanish teacher (and I mean it, Erica is top notch) to create non-partisan posters to encourage Fruitvale voters to hit the polls on Tuesday. Students also had to register to vote in our student council elections two weeks ago, in addition to taking a voter eligibility test from Louisiana from the Civil Rights era. Lots of deep work here, and more to come. It looks like we will be partnering with a local organization called Jewish Family Community Services to sponsor a refugee family from Syria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Russia, or a Latinx country this holiday season. Stay tuned for volunteer opportunities!

 

The Chanterelle is published! Students are proudly sharing their work in the Author’s Chair celebration. In case you child did not share it with you last week, here’s the digital pdf.

The next unit will be on letters, from business correspondence to thank you notes to texts and emails. We will post a bunch of them, as well, and see if we get responses. It’s a fun unit. Details to come.

 

Homework

Math:

• 4th grade: 2-sided worksheet
• 5th grade: 60 minutes of Dreambox by Friday. You have a new assignment.

Reading: Bingo! 4 nights of reading is bingo. Still want to see some videos of kids reading to their parents!

Writing: 4 letters this week. Each one page in length. Different kinds of letters to try out: correspondence with faraway relatives, letters to famous people, letters to historical people, humorous letters (parody), letters of complaint, letters of gratitude…whatever you can think of!

Spelling: Study your words! Follow the directions in your packet. Feel free to make a Quizlet sort if you feel so inclined. Here’s one for the Redwood group.