Thank you to all the Temescal families who joined us for our Winter Celebration of Learning to wrap up 2014 with us! We appreciated the festive treats, as well as the singing, strumming, and all of your help. The writers were thrilled to share their five-paragraph expository essays with you and hear your appreciations and applause. In the new year we will begin a research writing project on local plants and animals.
Our fractions work in math took on real-world meaning when we divided a strawberry rhubarb pie gifted to us by Brandt from Extended Day. We divided the pie into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenth . . . until there were enough equal pieces for all who wanted a slice with their snack. Thank you, Brandt, for the special treat! Katherine has been working with small groups to work on multiplication fluency with the Nine Lines approach, and we have been working with master teacher, Nancy, to incorporate Montessori materials in our fractions work.
For science we made observational drawings of our crystal snowballs that grew over the weekend. We also made Sound Sandwiches and talked about how sound is made by vibrations that travel through the air and are picked up by our ears. We are sure you will want to make Sound Sandwiches for all your family and friends 😉 . . . so here is the link. Thank you, Sherry, for the fun and noisy science idea.
We continued our conversation with Kate Klaire about bullying and gateway behavior. In this Pixar clip we noticed and labeled examples of both. We encourage you to watch it again at home and talk about how to be an “upstander.”
We have been learning about each other’s winter holiday traditions and decorating for the season with pipe cleaner snowflakes, paper chains, cookie decorating, and drawing and illustrating our new year’s resolutions in snow globe templates.
Over winter break we hope you and your children are enjoying time with family and friends. Be safe and Happy New Year!
See you all in 2015 . . .
