Hello Families,
We have finished our first full week of the school year, and it has been a test of stamina for some this week, myself included.

Before I hop into a recap of what we’ve done this week, I wanted to talk about the Weekly Reflections and the Friday Folders. These folders will go home every Friday filled with work that they have done this week. In the left “Leave at School” pocket, you can take those sheets out and do with them what you typically would with work from school. In the right “Return to School” pocket, you’ll find a Weekly Reflection sheet and a few pieces of work from this week. Please look over this work, write a note to your child, and return this Weekly Reflection sheet AND the corresponding sheets that they reflected on. We’ll compile all of these Weekly Reflection sheets into the white 3-ring binder that your Temescalian brought in at the beginning of the year.
For more information, please look at this video I made a few years ago:

In Math, we are launching our addition and subtraction unit that will eventually involve 2-digit and 3-digit problems. Until then, please help your Tememscalian practice their “Friends to Ten/Make Ten” facts (the two digits that make 10, e.g. 0+10=10, 1+9=10, 2+8=10) To help them with their math practice, I introduced a game called “King Ten” where you take ten single digit numbers and line them up in a column, then you find the “friends to ten” to make ten, and then add the left over numbers together. Using this trick of finding tens may lessen the amount of numbers that your Temescalian needs to keep track of while calculating more numbers.

Temescalians also learned games from Bridges called “Make a Sum” and “Target Twenty”.
You can use cards to play these games or use these links to play the online version of these games:
Make a Sum
Target Twenty

We started our Water and Weather Unit where we did a “Cloud in a Jar” experiment.

Temescalians tried to think about what was happening in the jar, and what they were seeing wasn’t so much a “cloud in a jar” but seeing a microcosm of what happens in the atmosphere AND wind in motion! Wow!

You may have already seen the water cycle in Temescalians’ S.T.E.A.M. (Science Technology Engineering Art Math) journals, and an aspect of that is transpiration, water moving through plants back into the atmosphere. In order to see transpiration in action, we put celery in food coloring, being careful to remember to have a “control” jar of clear water and we observed the celery stalks over the course of 3 days. We noticed that the food coloring quickly went through the celery, but that the one in the red jar seemed more sickly and withered than the other ones.
We also noticed that each of the water level was mostly consistent with each other, except the purple one. We wondered why that was. We started thinking about the “tubes” inside of the celery that brings that water through it, back into the air, and how the pigment used to color the food coloring was getting left in the tips of the celery and starting to block it, thus cutting off the “tubes” and not allowing water to travel through the celery any more.
With the remaining celery, we cut it up and shared it during snack!

We have started our cursive handwriting practice and the kids are so excited about it! We wrote our first cursive “i” and the Temescalians are ecstatic about our cursive journey!

 

Last week, the middler schoolers had their Middle School Olympics, and we got to see the teams show off their spirit and the K-5 cheered everyone on!

We hope you have a restful weekend!
Warmly,
Lisa

Upcoming Events:
September
21 – Back to School Night (Adults only, 6:00 – 7:30pm)
22 – Minimum Day (Dismissal at 12:20 for Temescal Creek. Children can bring their lunches and we’ll eat together before dismissal)
25 – In-class Guest educator: Keith Gutierrez

October
5 & 6 – Parent Teacher Conferences (no school, childcare available)
9 – Indigenous Peoples’ Day (no school, no childcare)
22 – Fall Fest (10am – 1:00pm)
31 – Halloween Parade on UAC (9:00am)

November
3 – Oakland Ballet: Luna Mexicana at the Paramount Theatre (limited chaperones needed, leaving TBS at 8:30am)
10 – Professional Development (no school, no childcare)
20 to 24 – Fall Break (no school, no childcare)