It was wonderful to meet with you over conferences to discuss your hopes for the year and go over your students progress so far. It is so helpful to connect and give you a window into what is happening in the classroom and how our community is developing. I will be using our conversations to develop concrete goals with students that they can work on for the remainder of the calendar year.

Feel free to reach out if you have any question that have come up since our conversations.

Buddies and CerritoBerry!

This month Cerrito has had opportunities to connect with community members outside of our classroom! We started meeting with our buddy classroom Blackberry Creek (1st and 2nd grade) and started the Friday morning ritual of Cerritoberry morning meetings where students from both 4/5 classes play games and build community.

Buddies provides 4th and 5th graders the opportunity to be role models to their younger buddies as well as provide fun support in reading aloud and talking about books. This week Buddies introduced each other and created a unique secret handshake together!

Cerritoberry worked on their skills identifying states on a blank map with a partner from the other class.

Cultural Studies

Students have been working away on their state maps, adding major cities, national forest, roadways, and key map features such a compass rose and a legend. They have been using different resources to identify basic information about the state as well as fun facts to share with their classmates.

While students are working within the states political borders, we are jumping way back in time; long before borders were a thing, to understand how the first people made their way to North America. We discussed how there are theories that change about how this happened and we examined one video that dug in to evidence found in 2018 that changed the understanding of different genetic groups.

 

Art with Julianne: Radial Frame String Art!