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.