Week in Review
9 11 2008
What a busy week! We completed our election unit with the election of Wyatt and Edmund as President and Vice-President. Congratulations to all the candidates and their supporters for a well-run election “season.” You may view candidate speeches, commericials and debates on this blog below.
In math we began the Investigations 2 unit on geometry and measurement. We have defined the attributes of quadrilaterals and triangles and we have defined regular and irregular polygons. Math vocabulary that we have discussed include: right angles, acute angles, obtuse angles, and equilateral, scalene and isosceles triangles. In addition, we have defined quadrilaterals, parallel lines, trapezoids, parallelograms, rectangles, rhombuses, squares, hexagons, heptagons, octagons, pentagons, decagons convex and concave, and Venn diagrams.
Reading projects were due on Thursday and will be returned to the students on Monday. For the most part, the projects were well-done. The students had one last chance to correct their work by adding sticky notes to each section where they found mistakes. Generally, we will need to continue working on remembering proper paragraph format and conventions. This project was the first of its kind for about half of the class. Using the feedback that I will individually give each student should help with the next reading projects.
Science was just plain awesome last week. The students brought in stones to add to their models to create barriers in their “rushing waters” experiment. We discovered how water takes the path of least resistance. In our second experiment we built dams in our models to save the community of Gaveo. Each team of engineers designed what they thought would be the best barrier to flash flooding in this simulation. Several teams achieved a variety of successes and some teams will be required to return their “earnings” to the Gaveo Town Council for failing to hold back devastation to Gaveo.
Three more parents are needed for our Stone Soup project on November 19. We will begin making soup around 9:40 and need about an hour of assistance. Please email Mr. A. if you can make it.
