It is hard to believe that it is already December, but it is! We bade November farewell with a poem and welcomed December with a haiku in our morning messages. Morning messages are a way for our community to connect and share. We often take a survey of favorite things or shared experiences. Some morning messages include “bloopers” that Temescalians catch and correct with editing marks. Sometimes we have math folded into the message. Other times, we share beautiful language, like these poems!
Having broken down multiplication into repeated addition and given different ways to visualize multiplication as arrays of chairs or things that come in groups, our study of multiplication continued as Katherine introduced “9 Lines” from the Making Math Real curriculum. Using a set of 9 lines, each line represents a “room” within a fact family “house” to help Temescalians visualize and become more automatic with their multiplication facts. We also worked with the algorithm and kids noticed that ____ = 3 x 4 is the same as 3 x 4 = ____. We will be working systematically through the multiplication facts each week, spending time on the different fact family “houses” with a review of the facts on Fridays. Temescalians are given a pencil and pen to complete a sheet of 30 math facts. Within 3 minutes, Temescalians use a pencil to complete as many as they can. After that period, they switch to pens and continue working until they finish. Our aim is not to create a high pressured situation with these fact checks however automaticity builds a strong foundation for future math work.
We are on our way with our Thankfulness Expository. As Temescalians transition from drafting to editing, they call upon one another to peer edit. Temescalian peer editors ask questions so the author will dig deeper; help with the mechanics of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation; and guide the author to paint pictures with his/her words. We are excited to share these pieces with you on Friday, Dec. 16 at our Celebration of Learning.
Temescalians have learned the needs of plants and they put this knowledge to the test. In pairs, they decide upon which need of the plant (water, sunlight, or air) that they wanted to alter. They wrote up their predictions and set to create their experiments. The control plant would be on the window sill in direct sunlight, get 1 sauce cup of water, and be in the open air. Some Temescalians decided to put their plant in a plastic bag to limit the air the plant would receive. Others altered the amount of water it got: no water, 8 sauce cups of water, 1/2 sauce cup of water. Some children though to focus on the amount of light the plant would receive: complete darkness in the closet, limited light from a bag with a hole cut in the top, or putting the plant in the center of the big square table where it would receive more artificial light than direct sunlight. The Temescalians recorded initial plant measurements and have been observing their plants since Tuesday, 11/29.
In conjunction with Information Literacy, Susan comes in to teach digital citizenship once a month. This time, she talked about what information is safe to share when filling out forms. The items starred with an * are required, but all other sections are optional
We also invited Alex Fine, a high schooler who has experience developing apps, to come in and talk about what it means to create an app. He shared that he had problems that needed solving, and he went about creating programs that would solve them! He shared that his dyslexia made it challenging to digest long texts so he created a program, Quill, that would pull out the main points from an uploaded article. He really got the Temescalians excited about programming, which is a perfect segue to the Hour of Code we will do on Monday!
In our efforts to support those in Standing Rock, we collaborated with Julianne to create banners for Craig Merrick to bring with him to North Dakota. It says, “Mni Wiconi” which means “Water is Life”. The artwork that we incorporated on the banner were hand prints and their reversals and water drops. As Temescalians placed these elements on the banner, they considered the conversation Julianne had with them about balance and design. She also shared the meaning behind the symbolism of the handprint in Native American culture.
With Strawberry Creek and Cerrito Creek, we shared with the K-8 student body about our efforts to support those who are protesting the pipeline construction in Standing Rock. Our efforts center on collecting donations for those who will camp throughout the winter. We will collect donations of warm clothes and camping gear until Tuesday, 11/6. Please look for large plastic bins in our classroom and in the office.
We celebrated this Temescalian’s half birthday! We loved seeing his baby pictures and hearing about him as a younger person.
Other views from the week:
We have a field trip to the Oakland Museum of California on Friday, 12/9. Please send your child to school with a packed lunch and layers. We hope to be back by dismissal on Friday!
