4th grade homeroom/SEL: Students were introduced to two key behaviors that have a powerful impact in our lives: kindness and flexibility. This week we made a chart about kind and unkind behaviors that we have observed in school. Volunteers wrote a compliment to themselves and another to a classmate, with an option of keeping it anonymous. Ms. Negron was a special visitor who led our first talking circle of the year! Students practiced listening to others, being respectful of different perspectives, and remaining focused on the talking point. On Friday, students chose an emotion and shared an experience they had with that emotion.

3rd grade math: This class has great energy for math! Our first chapter in our 4th-grade curriculum is about large numbers. We discussed when large numbers are useful and the different kinds of things they measure. We did problems related to place value and how different numbers may be written (numerically, in expanded form, and in words). We ended the week with a challenge question that we shared ideas about by writing our answers on the board and explaining our ideas in front of the class. It was a group effort that paid off because we succeeded in solving and explaining it together!

Makerspace, GK–8: 

GK–1: Students watched a video and listened to a song about how “the sun gives us light, heat, and food.” Students colored and/or drew a picture depicting the ideas about the sun’s energy and wrote words that they could about it: “sun, light, heat, food.”

G2–6: Students designed a car out of LEGOs and measured the distance that it traveled down a ramp. They sketched and recorded the distance traveled (in centimeters). Then they redesigned the car with the aim for it to travel farther. They sketched and recorded their redesign. Some students iterated as many as 5 designs with recorded distances. Then students shared and recorded at least one observation they made during this challenge (e.g., “the less wheels, the farther it travels”) and one question (e.g., “what if I added wings to my car?”). Needless to say, it was hard to stop them from experimenting beyond our class hour.