A Lesson in Free Enterprise

Mr. Bill's Crew had a blast on Tuesday as we held our Fall Market Day--an activity that gives students a chance to learn about basic economics.  They get to be producers, retailers, and consumers while operating their own business for a brief time.  Businesses sold everything from cookies to drawings to matchbox cars to chai lattes (oh, and a policeman-cookie jar that gruffly announced "BACK AWAY FROM THE COOKIE JAR" every time the lid was opened).

Some students operated by themselves and some formed partnerships. Some set their prices wisely and some didn't; some had a good sense of how much merchandise to carry, while others ran out quickly or were left with bloated inventories.  Some students budgeted well in order to pay their stall rental and income tax, while others came up short. But everyone had fun and gave the day a thumbs-up at the end! And all the practical lessons learned will be put to good use when we hold the second market day in the spring. 

A Lesson in Geography

The crew continues to enjoy getting and reading postcards from people all over the world.  We now have 17 of them posted. Landon--our honorary youngest crew member--is seen here with the map displaying the cards and their locations.

Colonies and Quotients

Expedition

We've started a whole new expedition--one focused on social studies instead of science.  It's called "A Tale of Two Colonies." As the name implies, we're looking at two well-known colonies begun by Western Europeans as they moved to North America--Jamestown and Plymouth.  What may be different from the traditional elementary school study of North American colonization is our emphasis. We are looking primarily at the issues and consequences of the interaction between the colonists, Native Americans, and imported slaves.  So far we've discussed what happened as the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians attempted to coexist.



Reading

For the last two weeks, we've been developing our ability to summarize text. We're learning this is a hard skill to master--to grab the gist of something without saying too much. We've also been working at using Edmodo as a tool in writing our summaries.

Writing

Our current genre study is short stories.  We've had fun reading and analyzing mentor texts that run the gamut on mood: everything from the bizarre and twisted ("Galactic Zap" by David Lubar) to the scary ("The Caller" by Robert D. San Souci) to the melancholy ("The Circuit" by Francisco Jimenez) to the thoughtful ("Thank You Ma'am" by Langston Hughes. 

Math

This week we reviewed our assessments from unit 3 (geometry concepts) and then made a big gear shift by starting unit 4, which focuses on division skills. So far, we've reviewed factoring and the partial-sums algorithm (a way to do long division that is explained in your unit 4 Family Letter).