Weekly Update 5/10/19

We had two more Junior Achievement lessons this week. Students learned about earning wages from various jobs, as well as paying taxes and where our tax money goes to support our community. The importance of voting was also discussed. Students weighed the pros and cons of three issues that could affect our local school community and then practiced voting.

Students are working on our final project for our government unit in social studies. Some students are working on creating public service announcement videos to address a local problem in our community and how it might be fixed. Other students chose to make posters about local problems that could be brought to town council meetings. They will be presenting the posters just as if they were speaking at a meeting to local officials. Finally, a third group of students elected to make Q&A Books all about how to be a good citizen. I can't wait to see the finished products!

In math, the students are learning about geometry. This is our last unit of the year. The children have been studying both 2D and 3D shapes. They are learning to classify shapes based on their sides, angles, faces, edges, and vertices. We will finish the rest of the lessons in Chapter 12 next week and hopefully test on Thursday. In centers, students have been creating a variety of geometric shapes with Knex, as well as solving puzzles with tangrams and pattern blocks. Monday was Global Day of Design and many students chose to use coding to make a Flappy Bird.

Book clubs are finishing up their last few chapters of their novels in reading. Students have been marking funny or surprising parts of the story to share. Our writing time has been spent making Mother's Day gifts. The students hope you love what they did! Finally, each child in class was given a free book as part of the BJC Book Brigade program. Thank you BJC!