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.