I hope you had a wonderfully relaxing weekend. We're having a slow, but steady, Tuesday morning here in Turquesa. We just finished our daily Community Gathering and I turned the class over to Ms. Amy for music. It seems like a perfect time for me to fill you in on a couple of significant things.

First, I hope you saw the announcement last week about Ms. Khavitha joining the MCH Elementary Faculty next year as the Upper Elementary Intern. Ms. Khavitha has tremendous experience as a teacher and I am really excited to be welcoming her to our team. She will be spending all summer in the training program at the Montessori Education Institute of the Pacific Northwest. I will be one of her instructors there! 

I also wanted to let you know that this Thursday afternoon, May 29, from 1:30-3:20 we will be having our final session of FLASH for the school year. Michelle Morse, a community outreach educator from Planned Parenthood, will be presenting puberty to us. I scheduled this due to the strongly expressed interest of the students, and I'm sure it will be tremendously valuable. On Thursday afternoon, I will send you a summary of the topics covered and a list of resources so that you can be prepared to continue the conversations with your child.

Next, we decided to cancel our library trip this week. We were scheduled to go tomorrow, but this morning the Turquesa community agreed that in-class time will be much more valuable at the juncture. Teams of students are hard at work on ancient Rome PowerPoints and they are excited to have dedicated, uniterrupted time for their projects. We will not be rescheduling this trip.

Finally, I want to make sure you have our annual Upper Elementary Family Feast on your calendar for June 16. I am attaching the invitation to this email so that you have all of the details. We are inviting Upper El students and their immediate families, as well as incoming Fourth Graders and their immediate families. This will be quite a few people! We will spending all day Monday, June 16th cooking. We would really appreciate parent volunteer support with our feast preparations. Can you join us for the morning or the afternoon? Please let me know!

It has been an incredible school year and I can't believe we're nearing the end!

Thank you,

Nicole

What a week!

Here's a list of amazing things we did:

• finished research for Ancient Rome projects
• learned about the classes of Roman society, including a long conversation about the Roman dependence on an entrenched system of slavery
• geometry lessons involving scalene, isosceles and equilateral triangles; acute, obtuse and right angles; measuring angles; and relationships between angles
• many individual math lessons involving fraction concepts and processes, prime factors and more
• multiple lessons about civil rights, personal courage, and freedom
• Harry Potter as our lunch-time read aloud
• songwriting involving fractured fairy tales
• many opportunities to assist Morado friends with their Passion Projects
• lit. circle with new books
• cheerful, flexible attitude about a disrupted week

Here's a list of things we just could not get to due to the disruption to our systems (don't worry - we'll make up the lost ground soon):

• Spelling tests (both post- and pre-tests)
• vocab test
• complete math (children finished about half of their math this week)
• lessons on how to create history project outlines, storyboards, and PowerPoints
• FLASH lesson
• our science lesson
• a Friday math timed test
• completed Continent Folios (this has been extended 2 weeks)

Towards the end of the day when I announced that I had not had the opportunity to create homework packets this week, there were groans of disappointment from the children. I felt like a really lucky teacher! So we compromised and I was able to put together a mini-homework packet. It has explicit details on the front cover. I'll give out a new one on Wednesday next week.

If you would like to accompany us to the Arboretum on Thursday, please let me know. We are in need of drivers due to our new Kindergarten Morado compatriots!

I hope to see you at the Passion Project Reception for Morado on Tuesday night. On a personal note, I'm thrilled because my daughter Louisa is a First Grader and she'll be presenting her first Passion Project on Astronauts! I've been waiting 7 years for this! You and your child are welcome to join the Elementary community to witness and celebrate the many wonderful accomplishments from the members of Morado. The reception is from 6-8 pm on Tuesday, in El Salon Indigo (our third classroom).

Have a great weekend!

Nicole

Hello Turquesa Parents,

Thank you for all of the Teacher Appreciation love this week! The new staff lounge, the coffee cart, the amazing lunch, and the wonderful gifts that came in so many forms ... wonderful!  We have just launched our study of Ancient Rome! This will carry us through the rest of the school year, and lay the foundation for next year's history/cultural study (Fall of Rome through the Renaissance).

Ancient Rome started to come alive for us this week, especially when I introduced our new independent history project! The project is a collaborative partnership between two students that incorporates shared research, a division of tasks, shared organization and planning, both shared work and separate tasks, and a joint presentation. Key aspects involve:

• Research and information collecting about an aspect of ancient Rome that has proven to be lasting and innovative.
• Project topics include: Arches, Mosaics, Aqueducts, Sanitation, Roads & Bridges
• Research should be investigative, focusing on
  •  its importance to the ancient Romans,
  • how it was constructed,
  • what were its benefits,
  • why was it important to the Romans, 
  • how was it used
• A PowerPoint slide show presentation that teaches others about the topic
• A presentation to a gathering of students that includes the PowerPoint, with prepared and practiced remarks

In other news, if you haven't ordered your Scholastic Summer Express workbook yet, I strongly suggest that you do! These are great books for helping your child to store this year's learning in their long-term memory and practice what they know. Please email the office ([email protected]) to let Ms. Allison know that you are interested. We will be ordering the books on Wednesday, so don't wait!

We have a couple of important dates for this coming weeks that I hope you can get onto your calendar.

• Tuesday, May 20 - Lower El Passion Project Reception (Come and enjoy the hard work of our younger compatriots!) - 6-8 pm
• Thursday, May 22 - Field Trip to the Arboretum (We need drivers! Join us for science and a picnic in a wonderful spot.)
• Wednesday, May 28 - Last Library Trip
• Saturday, June 14 - End of the Year Party with a children's concert (10-12 at Rosa Parks Elementary, Redmond Ridge)
• Monday, June 16 - Upper El Ancient Roman Feast (This is a fun annual event for Turquesa - we spend all day cooking from ancient Roman recipes and present a complete dinner to our families!) - 6 - 8 pm

We did not do a FLASH lesson this week, and I am going to amend the original schedule. I'll let you know what to expect.

Happy Mother's Day and Happy Weekend to you!