This busy week was peppered with events that were out of the ordinary.
[Taken from the email sent out by Kate Klaire earlier in the week]
“Our Middle School students have proposed an assembly/vigil and walkout on Wednesday, March 14, to honor the victims of the Parkland school shooting. In conversations with their teachers, these students expressed a desire to show solidarity with the #NationalSchoolWalkout campaign and represent The Berkeley School as a part of this important movement.
The students wanted to share with you their stated purpose:
Our goal in having this walkout is to stand in solidarity with other schools, honor the victims and their loved ones, and to create visibility beyond our school community. We are hoping to communicate our sorrow and disappointment that something like this could happen in school, a place where children should feel safe. The purpose of the walkout is to honor the victims, and show that young people can have a voice in their community.
All students are invited to wear orange to school on Wednesday (the color of the Never Again Movement.) The message the school is communicating to students is that this is a demonstration for peace and a showing of support, for the safety of school kids in particular.
The K-2 classrooms will participate by singing a song of peace and then will return to classrooms. 3rd through 8th grade students will join the national call to walk out and will be joined by students from Realm Charter School and Black Pine Circle.”
As we reflected about the walkout, Temescalians were surprised at how many cars showed their support of us by honking their horns as they drove by. Nancy Nash joined us for the walkout and our conversation afterwards and she said that she was just so proud to be a part of our community and be able to share this experience with us.
In celebration of Pi Day on 3/14, Temescalians created “Pi Puns”. Come into the classroom and take a look at our Temescalians’ inventive play on words!
We, of course, also enjoyed pie (spelled with an “e”!). Thank you for bringing in pie! Apparently, pumpkin pie is a favorite among our Temescalians! We talked about fractions and how if 13 people wanted to share half of the pumpkin pie, then their slice would be a sliver whereas if they chose blueberry, mixed berry, or any of the apple pie options, their slice might be bigger… Understanding that, everyone made their choices and at the end of the day, we ate pie!
Lest you worry that we didn’t do more number-y related things to pi, we “cut pi”! (Here is a list of pi day related activities, including “Cutting Pi”) Temescalians chose something round, wrapped a string around it to find its circumference. Cut it. Then tried to see how many times the length of the string (or the circumference) could go across the round object. The end result should be 3 full pieces with a little bit left over. This activities was a great application of the work we have been doing with perimeter vs. area, division with remainders, and fractions!
After having the whole week to try and memorize pi, we had volunteers try to see how far they could go! Earlier in the week, we talked about different strategies to remember things. Some kids talked about writing smaller sections out. Others talked about singing it to a song. While others still talked about breaking up pi into smaller chunks to remember a little at a time. One Temescalian even shared that you could add 1 digit to what you have already memorized each day. For example, Day 1: You would memorize 3. Day 2: You would memorize 3.1. Day 3: You would memorize 3.14. Day 4: You would memorize 3.141. And so on… All of these strategies were helpful to our Temescalians and 7 brave souls decided to stand up and try to see how far they could memorize and they each did a wonderful job of displaying concentration, memory, and their performance was a demonstration of perseverance to memorize as much as they did!
We also wrapped up Unit 5 of the Bridges math program that focused on multiplication, division, and area. In the “Rainbow Rectangles” activity, Temescalians worked in small groups to put in order different colored and sized rectangles from the least mass to the most mass. Then they needed to estimate the area of each rectangle, and then finally, to measure the rectangles to find the actual area. It can be hard for Temescalians to take the risk of being wrong and estimate but we encourage them to use the tool of estimation to help them learn if they are off and start seeing what would be a reasonable guess. To give them more support, we first measured one of the rectangles and figured out its dimensions. Armed with that information, the Temescalians estimated the order and area of each rectangle before finding out the actual area and re-ordering the rectangles if necessary.
Thinking about area can sometimes be daunting when you are faced with a rectangle with larger dimensions. If, for example, the rectangle is 7 x 9, you may already know that multiplication fact, but you could also try breaking that problem up into smaller parts. You could think about the area as (7 x 5) + (7 x 4). While you are still working with the same number of “things in a group”, you are breaking up the “number of groups”. Another way to think about 7 x 9 could be overshooting and thinking about it as (7 x 10) – 7. The idea is to break the problem into “friendly” numbers. In the first method, the friendly number was 5. 5s multiplication facts tend to be easier to figure out as are 10s multiplication facts. The second method for solving the problem involves overshooting the original problem because multiplying any number by 10 tends to be an easier task. Then take away from that product to get your final product.
How Big is a Foot? by Rolf Myller was a childhood favorite of mine that I shared with the Temescalians to piggyback with our use of customary units (inch, foot, yard, miles).
We also enjoyed reading, drawing near the end of A Wrinkle in Time, and we started reading Speak Up and Get Along, a book with tips and hints for how to “make friends, stop teasing, and feel good about yourself.” The social rules will help the Temescalians have common language for handling social interactions and depending friendships!
With the rainy week, we spent a lot of time indoors which lent itself to using Chromebooks to use Hour of Code games to program, as well as dive into Tinkercad. This renewed interest in Tinkercad may have been sparked by our pilot use of the 3D printer in our room. Julia, Susan, Jose, and I have a project brewing for a very basic design challenge that we’ll roll out after Spring Break. But in the meantime, we printed out a rook and a narwhal in the printer!
We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Julianne in our Super Science and Art slot on Friday with an introduction to tying and designing Celtic knots. Julianne also explained that each clan had its own pattern of cables for sweaters and she made the connection between how the Irish and the Ohlone used available materials in their daily life. The Irish used wool to make clothing because sheep were plentiful and it was basically waterproof while the Ohlone used tule because it was lightweight, readily available, and could protect them from the elements as they went about their day. The Temescalians learned how to draw an interlocking knot!
Celebrating a Temesclian’s birthday!
Upcoming things…
3/23 – Family Reading. Please join us and have your Temescalian read to you and share his/her learning with you from around the classroom!
Also, the Relationship and Cognitive Research Lab at UC Berkeley wants to partner with us for some research. They will be at the gate at 9am on 3/23 if you have any questions.
Finally, we had a friendly face pop in while she was stateside! We hope to reach out to this family via Skype and catch up with our Temescalian who is currently abroad!
