Week of Sept 21-25

Upcoming events:

• Unfortunately, the leopard shark sightings are few and far between this year.  Perhaps due to the water being TOO warm?  We decided to cancel our trip to La Jolla Shores this coming Friday. 
• Wed Oct 7- Fri Oct 9: We still have our Carlsbad campout next week to look forward to.  I am still awaiting a few Emergency Contact forms and $10 fee.  Please get that to me this week! The weather forecast looks great for now.  I look forward to a wonderful couple of days building class culture and camaraderie. Check here for packing list and supplies requests.
• Friday Oct 16: Tournament of the Phoenix Field trip at Poway Rodeo grounds.  We need drivers!!

Another great week is behind us!
In math, we continued our study of Shapes by estimating and learning how to measure angles. For a Unit Overview, click here. Students learned some academic language related to angles, including degrees, right angles, complementary angles and supplementary angles 
I collected students' notebooks over the weekend to check on their note-taking skills and organization of work. One goal I have this month is for students to be able to record and organize their work so they can easily explain to others their thinking and strategies for solving problems.
Students were signed up for MathXLfor school.com last week.  They will be taking a pre-assessment this coming week.  Look for the password and usernames this week in the home to school journal.

As for progress in our Human Body Human Being project (click here for project overview), students continued to work on drawing 4 of the major systems of the body and writing a short description of each of them in their project journal.  Students should be done with this next week and pick one of those systems to investigate more thoroughly.  Natasha taught the students about body mechanics and joint movement while brainstorming how we would like to perform our dance routine at the end of this project.  

Our "Outsiders" novel reading got us through a pivotal moment in the plot of the story.  Ponyboy and Johnny are currently in hiding in a church far from home after running away from the murder of one of their rivals.  We watched the movie up to the point they arrive at the church last week in order to give us a visual idea of the characters and the setting.  We generated vocabulary list #2 from our reading and students found the definitions and acted out the words last Friday. Click here for list. Our Quiz #2 will be Thursday October 1.