Processes That Shape Our Earth

   

Thanks to all of the families and friends who came to join us on passion project morning! It was a great opportunity for both students and families to connect and share their experiences.  Each project that the students presented were ones that they passionately chose and took pride in.   Giving students the opportunity to choose projects that expanded their knowledge and creativity was really rewarding for both the teachers and students. 

  This week we continued to work hard on writing our personal essays.  Students learned more about how to structure and format a five paragraph essay.  They also were encouraged to include transitional words throughout their essays.  We learned about how to create a strong our readers.  We are looking forward to wrapping up these essays in the coming week and submitting them to the Scribe for a chance to be published authors!

     We started a new unit in theme this week focused around the processes that shape our Earth.  There were a lot of great discussions about what “shape” meant when connecting it to our world and how it means something different than when we would use the word “shape” in math class.  Students were introduced to the concepts of weathering and erosion and will 

continue to explore them more throughout this unit.  They used their new understandings to determine how land formations such as canyons, valleys, and sand dunes are formed.  We are excited to do lots of scientific investigations about weathering and erosion in the upcoming weeks! Eventually students will use their new understanding to engineer a tarpul that will solve a problem for a fictional family in Nepal that we will read about. 

    During our read aloud time we are reading Sharon Creech's Love That Dog. This is a new (and challenging) genre for students because the narrator tells his story through prose. They have many questions about how and why the author would choose to do that and throughout the reading we have also read several of the works of famous poets that are mentioned throughout the text. We are looking forward to seeing how the book will be interpreted in play form when we attend the performance at the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center next week!