Academic Calendar and Connections for the Week of September 6

Friday

Connections:

Lucia's beautiful art work for the window won the vote for the class design contest of how we cover our lower windows that look out on the playground. 

Students wrote their reactions to "Optimist, Pessimist, Contortionist" in their journals. 

Students heard a third story by Dmitri Martin, "Spanish Teacher" (modified)  on multiple perspectives and we continued discussion of this theme. 

In social studied we continued to work with terms and practice related to location on maps, emphasizing finding a location based on latitude and longitude, plus they learned the distance between degrees of latitude. 

In a team building exercise they built self-standing marshmallow-topped structures out of spaghetti, string, transparent tape and a large marshmallow.  Results were placed on Seesaw, which was the first post on that platform.

Parents, we also sent home to a paper invitation and instructions to personally connect to Seesaw so you can see samples of your child's work as well as representative examples drawn from the class. 

Thursday

In our Getting to Know Each Other unit, students were given a math challenge project to do in table teams:  

In Mr. Hagstrom's room there are three windows. The class will fill the windows with equal size tiles sharing art / information about the students. Measure and find the area of the three windows.  What equal size rectangular or square tile will each student have when we fill all of the windows with tiles?   Any remaining area can be filled with borders, as long as the border has a smaller width than a tile. What size, if any, will the borders be? There are 30 class members.  Solve the problem in teams and present your solution to the teacher / class. You may work in metric or American Standard units, or both.

Students were observed for their cooperation, on-task behavior, problem strategies, and math readiness.  The lesson was debriefed in whole group.  Students needed to measure accurately in metric or American Standard, use multi-digit multiplication and long division, etc. 

For optional homework there is a design challenge - what will we create together using the paper tiles? What information about our students and class will we share?

Students also took a pretest on map knowledge and began Unit 1 in social science / geography, covering key physical geography. 

Finally we read a story called, "Optimist, Pessimist, Contortionist" as a springboard to continue to talk about multiple perspectives, diversity, and deeper meaning in stories.

Tomorrow, Friday, I will be sending home a folder with information for families. 

Wednesday

Ten Oni Drummers (Source)

Hello!

We begin the year with community building, organization, and becoming familiar with rules and routines. Students heard read aloud 2 stories:  "Ten Oni Drummers," from which we derive our class call / chant for quick attention. Our discussion turned to our international roots.  Students were given composition journals where they will do much of their writing. Setting up our journals, and for our call/chant, students learned how Japanese is counted from one to ten and they wrote the Japanese characters for these numbers.  Closely related, we learned from Lucia that those Japanese characters are actually Chinese / of Chinese origin, and we learned Adeline is 1/8 Japanese; two very cool things. This is all tying into our "Getting to know one another" unit as part of building our community. 

After lunch we unpacked and settled into our desk spaces where we will be keeping a minimum of essential items to avoid a jumb-ly mess and students heard the multiple perspectives story by Demetri Martin called "Beesting." We'll be sharing a series of vignettes from his This is a Book, book.  We'll be spending a fair amount of time on this theme of different perspectives throughout the year. 

A note on Student Planners.  I learned that the school's order has been delayed and that planners won't arrive for a couple weeks yet.  That being the case, I think we'll make due with a weekly agenda sheet that I'll create...shortly.😅

Kind Regards!

Mr. Hagstrom