Dec 15-19 Exhibition!

What a fantastic finish to our Drought to Deluge Project!  We had every 8th grader in attendance with their families during exhibition night! Students displayed their individual presentations about unique aspects of droughts and El Nino weather patterns. Groups and individuals also exhibited their designs and prototypes for water capture systems while discussing their experiences with condensation, evaporation, adhesion/cohesion, water flow and how animals naturally collect water.  Prototypes included "The Spider", a fog catcher, a specialized rain gutter, funnel and tarp systems, "The Quube" and a water capture design for our own school.  Although this project has come to an end, some students will be working with Beth in the Spring to create a working water capture system for our backyard garden.  It is exciting to know that our studies can affect students in a way that cause them to further their investigations long after the end of a class project!

Have a safe and happy holiday break!  I look forward to spending Christmas with my own sweet family but will miss my classroom family.  See you back on Tuesday January 6.  Enjoy all of the photos below!

Week of Dec 8-12

Upcoming Events:
Thursday Dec 18: Exhibition Night!  5:00-7:30pm  A message from our Director:  Exhibition night is truly NOT OPTIONAL for our students. For the past two months they have engaged in deep project work which includes questioning, wonderment, brainstorming, hypothesizing, going off campus for fieldwork, speaking with guest experts, service learning, researching, writing, computing, seeking answers in the history of their topic and more. This exhibition, including your presence, provides an authentic audience for the work our students have completed. Public officials and guest experts who have mentored our students are coming to revel in the final product of the work and reflect on its quality. One aspect of our exhibition is to support all of our students. We ask parents to visit at least 3 classrooms during the evening. If you miss this exhibition, you are truly missing the point of having your student at a project based learning school. We will be joined by Council Member Kersey, SD Unified Board Member Kevin Beiser, staff and members of La Maestra Community Services, and others will join you in this celebration of learning.


Winter Break:  Dec 22-Jan 5 School will be back in session Tuesday Jan 6




Here is a recap of our project being exhibited Thursday night....
Water is the life source of California, yet there is almost never enough of it.  For the past month and a half during our timely project "From Drought To Deluge," we looked at El Nino weather patterns and droughts and how they affect California.  Interestingly enough our project kickoff coincided with California experiencing relentless late season heat waves and questions as to whether this year's forecasted El Nino would really come to pass. Students asked questions such as: How does our ocean regulate the earth's weather?  How much water do we need to get out of the drought?  How can we retain the water we get for future droughts?  We created individual presentations based on specific interests that students wanted to investigate further related to our project. Of course, the question of climate change and global warming came up and students participated in a Socratic Seminar and a heated debate defending their views as to whether man is a major contributor to the problem or it is a natural cycle of our earth.  We had the opportunity of going to La Jolla Shores in late November to experience 80 degree air temperatures and El Nino ocean temperatures of 70 degrees.  Sealife was teeming in unseasonably warm waters.  A week later we camped out in the desert at Borrego Springs and experienced a drier than normal environment, even at the usually lush, damp Palm Oasis.  The rains started while we were there and our dry weather pattern broke with a downpour just before dawn.  In the past two weeks with the help of our subtropical rains, students have investigated, designed and tested water capture systems that helped them to better appreciate the importance of conserving and saving our precious water supplies.


My apologies for wet shoes and clothes on Friday as a few students, in their excitement to test out their water capture systems and also fill to the brim our 700 gallon water container worked in the rain.  This was not a requirement(!), but the result of students who are curious, passionate and excited about seeing their studies of weather in action.

This week, our classroom will be transformed into a weather center showcasing what students learned about droughts and El Nino.  Students will also have on display prototypes of water capture systems and a possible design we can use for our own backyard garden.

This past week in Writer's Workshop we completed the concluding paragraph and did some revision of our thematic analysis essays. We will peer review these essays on Monday. They will be printed and displayed at Exhibition night. We also started a transition into our next unit, investigative journalism. We learned the 5 Ws of any news story: who, what, when, where, and why, and we practiced identifying these items in newspaper or magazine stories. We also practiced writing our own introduction to a short news brief.


Our Math class included learning about triangles and deriving the Pythagorean Theorem.  We were able to use our knowledge of squares and square roots to better understand how to find the lengths and area of right triangles.

Week of Dec 1-5

Upcoming Events:
 Jog-a-thon:  Thurs Dec 11.  This week Bill’s Fifth Grade class is sponsoring our first ever jog-a-thon as part of their project: “Build a Better Being”. Their goals are to promote health and well-being and to raise funds for Rady’s Children’s Hospital.  With that in mind, we are asking all parents to encourage your children to participate. In order to do that they need to get one donation of $1. If your child brings in the dollar, they can participate and all benefit: Rady’s, your child, and Bill’s class. Please take the initiative to support your child. Middle Schoolers run 1:30-2:30.  Minimum pledge is $1.00 or you can pledge per lap. 


Exhibition Night:  Thur Dec 18.  5:00-7:30




The past week flew by!  During Math, students learned about square numbers and square roots in preparation of using the Pythagorean Theorem.  Some concepts include:

During Writer’s Workshop, we completed a quick draw squiggle story and reviewed the three-paragraph essay structure. We then continued to work on our thematic essay body paragraphs. As they completed their body paragraphs, some students went ahead and started their concluding paragraphs. These essays should be completed this week for peer review and exhibit next week. We also started an introduction to our next unit called Investigative Journalism by learning about the 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. We read a short article and had to identify the Ws in each article. This unit will start in earnest after the holiday break.


During project time, students participated in a Socratic Seminar as well as a very exciting debate addressing the question: "Is Global Warming a man-made issue or a natural occurrence?" We will have video clips of both discussions available during Exhibition night.  Students are designing a water capture system for our school as well as building prototypes of water capture systems used around the world.  This past week, students started Media Lab with Patrick. He is helping them polish their individual Drought to Deluge presentations.


This coming week, our classroom will transform into a weather center, showing off our research about the California drought and the El Nino weather system that is currently upon us.

Nov 17-21

Upcoming Events:  No School Nov 24-28 Happy Thanksgiving!

What a fun week!  We started the week with a new math unit: Looking for Pythagoras.  The unit started with mapping on a coordinate grid.  We played a game of Human Twister to practice plotting points on a Cartesian grid. 

                                                                                                  

                                            

We ended the week in beautiful Borrego Springs.  After arriving around noon on Thursday, we set up camp, ate lunch then embarked on a nice hike to Palm Canyon Oasis.  The dry dusty hike ended in a cool palm oasis.  I have hiked here many times and was surprised at how dry even the oasis was.  Usually we would have seen trickles of water as we got closer to the palms.  We were hoping to see bighorn sheep, native to the area.  We did find a frog or two! Throughout the trail, kids climbed on the beautiful rocks and enjoyed each others' company.  As we were walking back from the 3-mile hike, the winds started blowing from the west bringing clouds with them. Dinner was a pre-Thanksgiving feast of roast turkey and ham, corn, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cornbread and stuffing.  Pie and s'mores made a perfect end to a great meal. Unfortunately those evening clouds didn't go away and kept the stars at bay. We were unable to see anything but low flying planes through our telescope!  Our High Tech High astronomy buddies decided to stay home and reschedule a night with the stars at IA soon.  We woke up to a wet morning after a little rain around 4 in the morning.  It was nothing hot chocolate and pancakes couldn't cure though!  Many thanks to the students who contributed food, tents and supplies and to our chaperones, Wes, Cynthia, Elise, Susan and Sandra. Thank you, parents for allowing me the chance to get away with your kids.  We had a blast!