Hello!
I hope everyone is having a productive and inspiring week! This last week has been a busy one in Core Two. During our time with Jim in the Innovation Station (Thursday/ Friday) we built an aqueduct that moved water from a huge rain barrel to a bucket using tubes and PVC pipe. The students learned about gravity, water pressure, pushes and pulls. One class (T/F) has already started to come up with exactly how our city is going to get water. It has been really interesting to look into the different options with them, and to have conversations about the pros and cons of these different options. These are abstract ideas, and ones that I think would be great to study at home as well. One area of inquiry that would be interesting to study further at home is the idea of desalination. Many students are wondering if we could use ocean water as our main water source, which led to an interesting conversation about desalination. Interesting short video on desalination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aysj7696b0A The students read the book “The Little House” with their reading partners, which is the story of a little house out in the country that experiences the city growing closer and closer. The students have become very adept at creating a plan of how to read their partner reading books together and are doing a fantastic job supporting each other while they read these texts. In writing, they have been exploring and writing about the basic principles of physics. If you are looking for a way to explore physics at home, there are several 2nd grade physics units that you can find online. Here is one, if you are interested in trying some physics experiments/ activities at home: http://www.msnucleus.org/membership/html/k-6/as/pdf/as2p.pdf In math, we have been doing a variety of word problems, mental math, Georgia lessons, and games. One fun game that we have been playing is a hundreds chart game called “Hippety Hop.” Students should be able to teach you the game at this point, which would allow you to play the game at home with them! All you need is a hundreds chart: http://www.math-aids.com/images/Hundreds-Chart.png Announcements: Pizza and Spirit Day this Thursday and Friday Families, this Thursday and Friday will be our first Pizza/Spirit Day for 2nd semester. We are calling it" PaJamuary" and are encouraging students to wear their coziest school-appropriate pajamas to school. This day is never a "sleeper" (get it?? ☺) and the kids really enjoy dressing up! So send your kids to school with a few bucks for pizza and a pair of cozy PJs to help share in some school spirit! Work Journal #3 Due no later than 4:15 pm Friday, February 6. Please make sure these are turned in on time and complete! Keep in mind any feedback I gave you about Work Journal #2 and make the necessary changes. Thank you!! Work Journal #4 Meeting: There will be two options for Work Journal #4 meeting 1. Work Journal Meeting offered at PEC #3 ( February 11th) 2. Make up Work Journal meeting Wednesday Feb 18th from 2:30-3:30 Please remember that Work Journal Meetings are mandatory, so plan to come to one of these options. Thanks! Hello Everyone! I hope you are getting back into the swing of things with your homeschooling! We are already deep into our new “Tinkertown” project. Last week we began with pooling our background knowledge on what cities need and how they go about meeting those needs. We have also begun studying different types of maps and practicing drawing our own maps. The students chose which group they would be in (City Government, Neighborhood Council, Transportation Council, or Chamber of Commerce) and this week we are meeting in those groups to begin working on rough draft maps of our city. We have also begun to talk about force and friction, and they had their first day in the Innovation Station with Jim. All and all, we have had a fun and inspiring week and a half :) I had the chance to touch base with a lot of you last week at the parent meeting, which was awesome. I loved hearing all of your ideas on how to fit different elements of the project into your home school day. Below you will find the project overview along with a list of extension ideas for you to try at home if you are looking to extend the project at home. One idea to try at home this week: · Map your neighborhood: Take a walk around your neighborhood and have the child practice using positional and directional language (left, right, above, below etc) to describe the structures/ roads/ parks. Have the child sketch a map of the neighborhood after the walk. You can expand this to be a research project by looking up maps of the area and have your child do a compare/ contrast of the difference between his/her map and other maps. Another way to take this is to look up maps and pictures of what your neighborhood looked like in the past and compare to present day. Research why the changes occurred. We are going to be needing a lot of building materials for our city. If you have any of these things at home, or see a sale out in the world, here is a list of needed materials. Please feel free to drop off in class at the beginning or end of the day.
Needed Materials: Cardboard Toilet paper rolls Duct tape/ painters tape/ other tape Paint swatches from home depot (small colored pieces of paper for deciding paint color) Aluminum foil Foam board Paint brushes Straws String Toothpicks Paperclips Pieces of wood Washed tin cans (not soda, not sharp) Hot glue sticks Language Arts Update: I have changed around our language arts time slightly this semester. I have added Handwriting Without Tears and sight word spelling practice to our daily routine. I believe that students will benefit from this daily practice, and I am hoping that their ability to read their own, and each other’s writing, improves. I know some of you are doing Handwriting Without Tears at home, and I would encourage you to continue using it at home, as handwriting is a skill that is easier to build if you practice daily. Upcoming Events: Get SMART (Science, Math, Art) Wed, 1/21 | 5-7 pm Join us for this family event with Beau Janzen, a visual effects artist and math educator who works to inspire students and families by showing them the power of mathematics as a practical and creative tool. He will take us on a journey of understanding Stereoscopy and 3-D movies, merging ideas from projective geometry, Renaissance painting, color theory, the physics of optics and more. Welcome Back Core 2 Parents!
I hope that everyone had a wonderful winter break! I had a great break, but truly missed your kiddos! I am ready to get back to our days full of learning, playing, and exploration! (Side note: I had the chance to visit the Exploratorium up in San Francisco over the break. If you ever find yourselves up in that neck of the woods, I highly recommend it for both kids and adults.) I wanted to thank all of you again for all of the generous gifts, cards, and all around good vibes that I received before break! I feel so lucky to work with all of you and to have the opportunity to spend my days with your kids! I wanted to give you the first look at our next project. Both Patrick and I have been working all week to fine tune our plans, and we are beyond excited about this next project. Tinkertown: Students will build an understanding of how cities work and the different vital parts of a city. They will work together as a whole class to come up with a vision of a city that has all of the necessary components in order to meet the citizen’s needs (food, water, structures, transportation, energy) and draw a map of that city together. They will go through an authentic design process while planning and building models of their city. Students will build models of structures and vehicles that incorporate electricity and use basic principles of motion and force which we will be learning along the way. Students will also explore how people hold different roles within a city and work together to make the community serve their citizen’s needs. (Find the complete Project Overview under the "Projects" tab) We will be spending an hour a week in the Innovation Station (DVIA’s new maker space) and we will be building a model of a city in the classroom. There are a lot of ways that you can extend the work we will be doing at home. We will be giving you a list of home extensions, along with communicating ideas along the way. We wanted to offer a reconnecting meeting this Thursday and Friday after school (it is not mandatory). We will be meeting from 3:15-4:15 on Thursday and Friday in Patrick’s room to discuss the new Tinkertown project, home extensions for the project, and some brainstorming on the next semester with regards to reading. We would love if you can make it! |
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February 2017
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