Nov 3-7

Upcoming Events:

• Veteran's Day No School Tuesday Nov. 11
• 8th Graders help with pizza lunch on Thursday
• Recycling Drop off Friday mornings curbside or any time in room 509. We can take cans, plastic or glass bottles .
• Overnight to Borrego Palm Canyon State Park 9:00 am Thursday Nov. 20 - 12:00 Fri Nov. 21 cost is $6.00.  More info will be posted this week.

Thank you for the well wishes for my daughter. Her surgery went well though she is a lot of pain.  I have had the pleasure of spending the past 5 nights in the hospital(not really a pleasure!) and am grateful for Cynthia for taking over our class on Wednesday and Friday.    

This week during our project, 'Where's the Water? From Drought to Deluge' chose individual  topics to research and present. The presentations will be on display at next month's exhibition night (Thur. Dec 18) Our field trip to La Jolla Shores couldn't have been a more perfect day, weather-wise at 80 degrees with a water temperature of 69 degrees! Unfortunately, the sharks weren't out in the numbers we hoped as it was low tide. There were sightings of one leopard shark, corbina and a seal swimming in the waves with the kids and tons of sealife in the tidepools north of Scripps Pier, including a large octopus!  More pictures coming!

In Math, students applied their knowledge of linear and nonlinear relationships by completing the ACE #3 assignment.
 On Friday we started a activity relating arm span and height using the Vitruvian Man

Vitruvius, a Roman engineer of the first century B.C., influenced Leonardo da Vinci's work in architecture and also his drawing of the human figure. One of Leonardo's drawings is called the Vitruvian Man. It is based on a model of ideal proportions which Vitruvius established. Upon viewing the drawing, the conclusion can be made that the length of a man's arm span is equal to the height of the man. In other words the ratio of the Vitruvian Man's arm span to his height equals 1.

During this activity, students measured each others' arm span and height to investigate the conjecture by Vitruvius. On Monday we will decide how to best display and analyze the data to test his claim.

We are almost complete with our Unit on Thinking With Mathematical Models and should wrap it up by the end of the week.

Writer's Workshop below is a message from Melissa, our WW teacher:
Thank you parents for giving me the opportunity to work with your wonderful kids. Since I came on board in October to teach writer's workshop, I have found many of them to be very descriptive writers which is a hard skill to learn and use. To give me a sense of where they are in their writing maturity, I had them respond to a Cahsee test writing prompt. I hope to use this to show growth as the year progresses. In the past couple of weeks, the students have been exploring theme identification and summary writing in anticipation of writing a thematic analysis essay. This has included working on the structure of an introductory paragraph: attention getter, summary, and thesis statement or claim. Our finished essay will identify a theme found in Ray Bradbury's story, "All Summer in a Day." In class this past week, we worked did activities using well-known tales and short poems to help us identify themes and learn how to justify our opinion. We had a lively discussion as the point was not to arrive at a correct answer, but rather, to be able to support one's opinion. We found that several different themes could be identified with each story depending on how the student analyzed the story elements. We also practiced identifying the parts of an introductory paragraph and writing different kinds of attention getters. On Monday, we will use these ideas to start our "Summer" essays.