Dear families, 

This week we launched book clubs across Cerrito Creek and Strawberry Creek cohorts.  Book clubs allow us to build up reading skills, foster a deeper understanding of literature by reading with support from peers and teachers in small groups, encouraging students to discuss, analyze and share their perspectives on shared literature and reinforce relationships across cohorts. Students read aloud, practicing fluency and expression and engage in discussions exploring meaning and themes in literature. 

In science, we read about Hans Christian Ørsted’s possibly accidental discovery of electromagnetism during a lecture and took on the challenge of building an electromagnet ourselves.  Using a steel nail as a core, insulated copper wire and a battery we made electromagnets and adjusted variables to observe the effects. The variables included adjusting the number of coils of wire around the core and changing the number and size of batteries.  We then created labelled drawings of our models and wrote a short explanation to describe how they worked. 

In language arts, we continued with our realistic fiction writing, approaching our end goals of finishing drafts this week and finally concluding next week to move on to editing and second drafts.  Students who finished then identified plot elements in their own writing by color code highlighting exposition, rising action, climax and falling action / resolution in their own stories. 

4th grade mathematicians have begun their unit exploring fractions and decimals this week. We created a variety of fraction strips to get hands-on experience comparing fractions of different denominators, identifying equivalent fractions and comparing them, and working with improper fractions and mixed numbers. 5th grade mathematicians have continued their place value in decimals and reviewing strategies for multiple digit multiplication.