Seed Dispersal Design Challenge, Math Night, and Map Skills

This week started with many voting related things! On Monday, the 6th graders invited grownups to visit as they shared their understanding of different propositions up for voting for all Californians. The kindergartners in Sweet Briar also set up their own polling for 18+ year olds to decide the name of the class blog. Through this vehicle, kindergartners learned about the voting process and helped the voters along. The results will be revealed soon!

The Temescalians returned to the seed designs they created in pairs on last Friday’s Super Science and Art. After seeing the initial iteration, they looked at the designs that traveled far and had the opportunity to change their design. Many saw that a cylinder shape, though popular on the first trial, allowed air to go through and we saw that in order for a seed to travel far by wind, we needed to design something that would catch the wind. On their second try, many made cone or origami folded sails. There were surprising results, but many learned from the first design and tweaked their designs to hopefully go further.
During the second trial, we talked about how in science and in design, scientists/engineers/designers don’t just do one trial and be done with it. They often try the same design many times to make sure that their result is consistent before moving on and trying to change the original design. We also talked about how this design challenge wasn’t so much about whose design went the furthest, like a competition, but we emphasized that we were learning which design was most effective. We encouraged everyone to borrow and adapt designs that they saw were effective in the first trial to their second design.

The top row, with blue tape, is the second iterations of the designs.

Look at the range of designs and their successes!

Use the code: TemescalCreek! to view the following videos of our second trials for a few of our seed designs.

Temescalians began more focused spelling groups. Groups focused on short vowel sounds, blends such as pr/dr/br/tr, “r” controlled vowels like ar/ir/or/ur, and plural nouns that end in sh/ch/s/x/e. Temescalians will practice different spelling patterns and on Fridays, we’ll start giving them spelling checks, along with a set of 5 sight words. This more structured approach should help give Temescalians a more defined understanding of word families and continue to build their awareness of how letters come together to spell our English language. We also put up frequently used words above the cursive alphabet. Ask your Temescalian why some are highlighted in yellow and why some have orange along the outside of the card.

We practice spelling awareness by using mats and sorting words into different categories.

Using words in sentences is another way to practice spelling patterns.

Playing “Hangman” is another way to develop spelling awareness.

Berkeley / CA / United States - 11/12/18

We circled back to retelling stories with a “5 Finger Retell” graphic organizer. On it, you had to write out characters, setting, problem, beginning/middle/end, and the solution/conclusion. This graphic organizer limited the Temescalians from including every detail from the story. Instead, they had to synthesize the story into 1-2 sentences and really figure out what were the most important parts to include.

A Temescalian volunteered to demonstrate how to fold paper cranes, and she reflected how hard it could be to lead a big group through an activity that took patience and developed fine motor skills. Many noted their zone when they didn’t understand the next fold right away. They brought themselves through the activity by remembering to breathe and helping one another. This activity inspired one of the two Rocket Write prompts: If you didn’t need to sleep, what would you do with your extra time? OR If you could ride the origami crane anywhere in the world, real or made up, where would you go? Many went with the origami crane prompt, opting to describe fantastic lands out of storybooks. While others answered the “no sleep” prompt in their writing. Many of those writers described using the freed up time to play video games or watch movies.

For cursive, we learned the letter “l”! We introduced “Backboard Writing” where Temescalians are paired up and one is the “backboard” and closes his/her eyes while the other uses his/her writing finger to write a word of my choice that uses letters that we have already learned. The only clue we give the backboards is how many letters are in the chosen word. This practice is not only for the writer, but the backboard to hone awareness of elements of different letters. Try this at home with your Temescalian! We have learned the letters: i, t, u, w, e, l.

This unit’s focus of multiplication was looked at in different ways. We talked about the “commutative property of multiplication”, which means that you can switch the factors of a multiplication number sentence and you would still have the same product. For example, 3×4=12 and 4×3=12. We reminded the Temescalians of their work with arranging chairs. An arrangement that looked “horizontal”, like 3 rows of 4 chairs (3×4), had the same product as an arrangement that looked “vertical”, like 4 rows of 3 chairs (4×3).

We also taught the Temescalians a new game called Frog Leap Multiplication, where you leaped a number of times with ___ hops. (This is just another way of presenting skip counting!) We connected this game and trying to figure out number line puzzles with the cube trains that we did last week. We explained that for multiplication, we are introducing a lot of different ways to think about multiplying things and how numbers are related. In the end, we hope they decide for themselves a method that makes sense to them: thinking about it in terms of skip counting on a number line or thinking of the multiplication problem in terms of an array. When working with an array, we introduced the idea that sometimes, you can split the array up into smaller chunks that are more manageable. For example, if you have 8×4, you may not know that, but you could first draw out the array. Then split it in half so that you now have (4×4) + (4×4) = 16 + 16 = 32. With all of these different ways of thinking about multiplication, we are supporting Temescalians in being more flexible with their manipulation of the numbers in multiplication.
Families were invited on Thursday night to our annual Math Night. This evening gave Temescalians an opportunity to be the guide to their grownups of how we practice number sense and computation skills. Temescalians selected different games that we have learned from the Bridges curriculum as well as other sources such as Marcy Cook tile games, Real Estate Math, and Arranging Chairs. We punctuated the evening with two group games of SKUNK. The grownups seemed to have just as much fun with this game as the Temescalians. It was interesting to see when everyone decided to sit down in each round. Thank you again for joining us! We had such a great time practicing math skills. One grownup shared that one learns best when laughing, and we certainly had a lot of laughter that evening!

With our 7th grade buddies, we wrote letters to the Berkeley city council members to thank them for not allowing developers to build over the West Berkeley Shellmound. It was nice to join forces with our buddies to connect with those beyond our school community.

We dove into map reading skills as well as thinking about our place in the world. First with the Ohlone people, we made connections between where they used to live and familiar landmarks like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the Golden Gate Bridge, and The Berkeley School. In another group, we learned cardinal directions and looked at maps and discussed how this 2-D representation of land is different from that of a globe. Finally, with Julianne, we looked again at where we live in the East Bay. All along, thinking about a class through line: How does where we live affect how we live?