This week students have been working on selecting Science Projects for our hands-on Science Exploration during the April 14th Early Bird Event. Students will be showcasing science projects that they choose from ScienceBuddies.org. They took a quiz about their interests and then Science Buddies listed dozens of possible projects. Students then listed their top 4 projects and sat down with us while we discussed their preferred project. Many students chose to email their projects to parents if that particular project needed parental approval. If you are unsure as to which project your child has, let me know and I will send you a link.

The kids are all very excited about each project they chose. Students chose a wide variety of projects from how rock candy is made to showing how different shapes can be invisible to radar to "molecular scissors" understanding DNA splicing. We tried to steer children to projects within their capabilities, and if they were adamant about a certain project, they had to talk to parents about home support. There will be some time to work on these projects at school, but some projects will require experimentation and building at home.

This is not a science fair as science fairs tend to imply rigid guidelines and competition. This will act more as a guideline for science exploration of hands-on items and experiments. Science Buddies has a ton of excellent resources and guides as well. Check it out here: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/

Thank You,

Ms. Alyx & Ms. Nicole

Last week students started new biography books for their Lit Circles and met with their groups to talk about knowledge they already have about their person. They have also been working on their Greek Gods and Goddesses Family Tree as well as Mediterranean maps in their cultural studies. They had a lesson about the Oracle of Delphi last week. This will lead into studies about famous people of Ancient Greece and Rome and studies of Spartan vs Athens.

Students have been doubling down on math lessons to prepare for our annual Math Day coming up on March 23rd. Math Day is always a wonderful celebration where students love to give parents lessons using Montessori Material.

Last Tuesday was Pi day and we had a parent come in and give a lesson about why Pi is so special. The students ate pizza to celebrate and had fun measure circumferences and diameters of various circular objects and figuring out how close they could get to 3.14.

A couple weeks ago we also held a fun eral for Morado's class guinea pig pet, Spike, who died at the age of 7. It was a beautiful and nice ceremony and students shared stories of their experience with Spike.

We also have two field trips next week that we could use a few more volunteer drivers. We are going to Seattle Children's Theatre to see SeedFolk and to Seattle Art Museum to see the Jacob Lawrence Exhibit. Check out Bloomz sign ups for more information. 

Ms. Nicole & Ms. Alyx

The past couple weeks have been very exciting and we have started a lot of new stuff. Students have been hard at work picking up a ton of new ideas.

A couple weeks ago we started introducing handwriting and cursive lessons that have captivated a lot of children. Instead focusing on just "this is how to write a cursive A", we are introducing students to the idea of handwriting involving muscle training throughout your arm and shoulder. We did exercises that made students aware of the muscles they use when writing and how we need to train weaker muscles to learn how to write using motion of their whole arm instead of just wiggling fingers. We shared really stunning examples of handwriting (that I found on Reddit.com/r/handwriting), as well as viewing handwriting like art, which have inspired many kids to really focus on their writing. Through these, we have been introducing cursive using sections of chunks of letters that have similar motions.

Lit Circles have been wrapping up our books on cultural diversity and Wednesday students will present their posters that highlight their job and what their book was about. Our next section of lit circles will focus on biographies and will go out either Wednesday or Monday.

We have also returned a focus to word problems and how to solve them. We have been practicing a variety of word problems to learn how to show the process of solving them in a variety of ways.

Students had fun working on "Geometry Plane Art" and have now expanded into making their own art.

We have also introduced our unit on Ancient Greece and Greek city states.

Hop-A-Thon was a success! The students paired up and counted each other's hops. Most students hopped over 100 hops and many others also reached 200! 

​Ms. Nicole & Ms. Alyx