A STEM-full Send off into Spring Break & Returning to New Units
Before the break was a week full of STEM goodness. That’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, for those new to the jargon!
Math Night
Tuesday, April 1st, saw the return of Math Night, a beloved pre-COVID tradition, in a new format! 4th and 5th grade families spent time in their math classrooms playing math games, puzzling through riddles, and putting on their student hats as the kids taught them some of the ‘new’ math strategies they’ve learned in class. From there, families were invited to head upstairs to the Middle School to play math games designed by the students in a math carnival-type fashion. It was an amazing turnout and so fun to be able to talk about math with so many families! Check out the pictures of math engagement in action!
We’ve Got Gadgets and Gizmos Aplenty!
Thursday, April 3rd Cerritans and Strawberries played host to the rest of the UAC to show off their completed electrical gizmos and gadgets. The culminating project for our unit on Energy, Electricity, and Magnetism, students paired up to build a gadget that did…something…anything! Most anything that demonstrated the students could build working circuits was fair game. While that sounds like a simple task, our 4th and 5th grade engineers soon found themselves grappling with the physics of spinning motors being unbalanced, wheels rotating the wrong way, electromagnets not being strong enough, and gears refusing to stay engaged, amongst other obstacles that all provided authentic and highly motivating problems to solve. From brainstorming ideas, building multiple iterations, writing a script, and finally recording a demonstration video, students capped it off by hosting visitors for live demonstrations. Check out the video of their Gadget Fair, and pamphlet covers below, and click here to see the rest of the pamphlets and video presentations.
New Units Launching
With 8 weeks left, we are in the home stretch, starting our final units of the year across all subjects.
April is National Poetry Month so we spent this week learning about what makes a poem a poem, the ‘rules’ of poetry, and then of course, how all those rules go out the window with free verse poetry! We analyzed some a few free verse poems before venturing out to Strawberry Creek Park to be inspired by nature to write our own free verse poems. A session on poetry would be incomplete without sitting amongst the ‘poet-trees’ to hear each other’s work read aloud. Snaps all around!
In science, we are launching to the stars with a unit on the solar system. To help us prep to really grapple with the enormity of it all, we began with an investigation on scale, and guest teacher, Beto, of Strawberry Creek led Cerrito on a scale walk of the solar system. With a tennis ball as the sun placed in the Cerrito classroom, ask your child how far we had to go to get to our demoted, but still dear-to-our-hearts dwarf planet, Pluto. DO they remember how big Mercury would be in this scale?
And lastly, our last big writing piece of the year will be a persuasive argument. 4th and 5th graders LOVE to argue and were keen to debate a few hot claims, such as ‘It is more helpful to have a strict teacher than a relaxed teacher’, ‘4th and 5th graders should be responsible for packing their own lunches’, and ‘It is better to work in a group on a school projects than independently’. Students were unknowingly practicing elements of keen argumentation, including direct rebuttals, examining nuance and exceptions, and phrasing their reasoning carefully. This unit will also require research, so students can ground their argument in fact rather than opinion. Check out some of the captured reasons your kids sided with yes or no on these topics.
