Hot Rocks and Blue Birds

This week, our crew got back in the swing of regular class time after last week's voyage.

Expedition


As we continue to look at the building blocks of earth, we're exploring how different kinds of rocks are formed.  This week we're looking at igneous rocks (formed by heat) and sedimentary (formed with sediments).  For igneous rocks, we performed an experiment to see how the rate at which rock cools affects the size of the mineral crystals in it. For sedimentary rocks, we performed an experiment to see how the weight and size of various sediments causes layering.

Math


On Monday, we took the unit one assessment on factoring and related skills.  On Tuesday, we had the opportunity to discuss the assessment and learn from our mistakes as we retried missed items. The next day we started our second unit, which focuses on computation skills such as estimating and applying addition/subtraction algorithms.  Be sure to ask your child for the family letter for unit two.

Reading


We are practicing non-fiction reading skills.  In particular, we are paying attention to the signals that go off in our heads when we've just come across new information that we can connect to knowledge we already have on a topic.  We also reviewed the various text features non-fiction uses to provide
information to the reader.

Writing


Students worked diligently to complete the final copies of their memoirs.  Each person chose one of the memories they wrote about in the last four weeks and used it as the basis for their final writing project in this genre study.  We used various revising strategies, such reading it out loud to yourself.  We also talked about ICE PUCCS (ask your child what this means).

Service Learning

We kicked off our service learning project for the year--our cooperation with the city of Castle Rock on the Colorado Bluebird Project.  This is a year-long project in which we'll construct boxes for bluebirds to nest in and then collect data on their nesting behaviors.  As we participate, we'll be increasing our knowledge in several areas, including weather, biology, and data organization.