Happy New Year! This week in Strawberry Creek, we eased our way back into our classroom routines, resetting ourselves through thoughtful reflection.  Students shared how they felt on their first day back, what they missed about their community and what they are looking forward to this year.  

To celebrate Bill Nye earning the Medal of Freedom, and to refresh our understanding of electricity and circuits, we watched an episode on electricity and then discussed devices from the episode that were powered by circuits and identified if they ran on alternating currents or direct currents. Later in the week, we played a game of “Mockups” in which student teams were given 3 randomly generated design challenge factors for who they design for, what function it must fulfill and what design constraint it must be included. For example, “design a way for 1) bus drivers 2)to keep their heads warm 3)that must be edible. For these novel design/engineering challenges students worked to create mockups with labelled drawings, noting materials and features and wrote short paragraphs explaining their design choices and functions.  Students then presented to the whole class and audience members considered possible flaws in their design ideas.  This work is in preparation for the next science project we will work on: creating gizmos that demonstrate energy through one of three ways: motion, sound or light.  

We concluded our class read aloud of “Stamped For Kids: Racism, Antiracism and You.” This impactful book gave us an overview of the origins of racist ideas and policies at the roots of United States History.  Author SOnja Cherry-Paul gives the analogy of a rope, to have us consider how a rope can be a lifeline. Or a rope can be a weapon used to harm. A rope can also join people like jumping Double Dutch. This rope represents people’s ideas about race, pulling at both ends with racist and anti-racist ideas.  The history and themes in this book opened up many rich and complex topics for class discussion and grounded our understanding of the present day. 

We also introduced typing club this week.  Your child can access typing club at home using this link and can log in using their school gmail accounts.

This week we also had a Morphology pop quiz to show what we know after the break, what has really remained with us. In partners, students reviewed morpheme cards targeting morphemes that they identified needing more practice with.

4th grade mathematicians have worked on geometry concepts of similarity, area, symmetry, and perpendicular and parallel lines.  5th grade mathematicians reviewed fractions and worked on 2025 themed math puzzles, creating and solving a variety of expressions equal to 2025 using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and exponents.