Erosion Experts

This week in Mosaic we developed our understanding of weathering and erosion by doing various scientific investigations to discover how these two forces shape our Earth overtime.  On Thursday we had a wonderful trip out to the Allen Brook to observe how erosion is happening right in our own community.  This upcoming week students will use their new knowledge that they have gathered about weathering and erosion, in which they will perform a science inquiry task about how weathering and erosion changes sand dunes change overtime.  In groups students will collect data and then analyze it using a graph, they will also convey their understanding by writing a strong prediction about what they think will happen throughout the task and reflection about their learning and what they observed throughout the investigation.

In literacy students are working on wrapping up their personal essays.  The last steps of editing and organizing their essays are pushing them to go back through their work to create a polished final draft.  We will be submitting students' personal essays to be published in the Scribe, the school's literary journal; it's produced each spring and has a collection of artwork and exemplary writing pieces from student authors.

In other news, on Thursday we watched the spectacular middle school production of Shrek! Students loved this play and many of them told me how much they look forward to participating in the play next year!

We ended the week by celebrating the arrival of Mrs. Parker's baby boy, William Stone. He was born at 2:16 on 4/8/16 , which is a pretty cool mathematical birthday! Congrats to Mrs. Parker and her family.

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!