STEAM Faire, Peaceful Warriors, and Seedpods

Tomorrow (Friday), the first and second grade class is having a bake sale to raise money for a wildlife garden here on campus. Send the kiddos with some cash!

Come One, Come All! I hope you're all planning on attending the 2016 STEAM Faire and Language Night event next Thursday (4/7) from 6:00-8:00.
Some highlights to look forward to:
- an adorable and hilarious video of skits that the students wrote- completely en espanol!
- our gorgeous rainforest dioramas
- writing and art introducing you to the students' invented animals, each with many remarkable adaptation for life in the Amazon Rainforest
- the results of our seedpod design challenge
- our research on sustainable fisheries
- and so much more!

We've now begun our training to become Peaceful Warriors. We read Secret of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman and defined a Peaceful Warrior as someone who:

• is his/her own person 
• knows that fear is the enemy
• is always giving to the world
• peacefully defends him/herself and defends others
• tries to do no harm
• is strong
• is gentle
• is deeply aware
• uses words
• is confident and careful
• always helps people up
• "...doesn't fight, doesn't run, because no fear can withstand the courage and love of the peaceful warrior."

As we continue down this path, I will give students a series of challenges asking them to step into their peaceful warrior spirit. Stay tuned!

Students working on prototypes of their seedpod designs:

Academy of Sciences, Because of Winn-Dixie, Juanita the Duck, Hockey, and Number Lines

Thanks to everyone, especially Astrid and our fabulous driver/chaperones, for making our trip to the Academy of Sciences a huge success!!!

We're reading one of my favorite novels of all time for young people:

The story takes place the summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida. Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal ten things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive. Winn-Dixie is better at making friends than anyone Opal has ever known, and together they meet the local librarian, Miss Franny Block, who once fought off a bear with a copy of War and Peace. They meet Gloria Dump, who is nearly blind but sees with her heart, and Otis, an ex-con who sets the animals in his pet shop loose after hours, then lulls them with his guitar. Opal spends all that sweet summer collecting stories about her new friends, and thinking about her mother. But because of Winn-Dixie or perhaps because she has grown, Opal learns to let go, just a little, and that friendship-and forgiveness-can sneak up on you like a sudden summer storm.

An ornithologist from Dominican University visited us at Bello Gardens to teach us about ducks like Juanita, Bello Gardens' resident duck. Check out the article in the SF Chronicle!

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Famous-Marin-duck-starts-giving-6875786.php

Here we are placing fractions on the number line. Some of the more complex fractions and mixed numbers needed to be simplified or be converted to "ready to go" form so that their values could be compared. 

Hockey with Kathy in PE:

 The 5th graders invited us to watch and rate their persuasiveness during their debate. The sides argued for and against keeping animals in captivity.

Fractions, Building a Kotcha, and Rainforest Dioramas

I love teaching fractions. I really do, I promise! There are so many ways to approach and extend learning for different students' needs.

One of the trickiest things to understand about fractions are that they are only comparable if they are defined by the same whole. For example, if I eat a half a pizza and you eat a third of a pizza, we don't know who ate more since I never said anything about the sizes of our pizzas!

To help students understand this concept, I've been using colored rods. The red rod is half of a purple rod, but it isn't "half" by its nature. The red rod is also a third of a brown rod or a fourth of a blue rod.  

I can also ask student questions such as, "If the blue rod is 2/3 of the whole, which rod is the whole? Which rod is 1/3 of the whole?"

We can use them to explore and model equivalency and create our own challenges to demonstrate deeper understanding.  

Pattern Block Fractions:

Today, some of the students are going to begin working on this great challenge problem by Kathy Fosnot:

A fourth-grade class traveled on a field trip in four separate vehicles. The school provided a lunch of submarine sandwiches for each group. When they stopped for lunch, the subs were cut and shared as follows:

• The first group had 3 people and shared 2 subs equally.
• The second group had 4 people and shared 3 subs equally.
• The third group had 9 people and shared 6 subs equally.
• The last group had 6 people and shared 4 subs equally.

 When they returned from the field trip, the children began to argue that the portion of the sandwiches they received was not fair, that some children got more to eat than others. Were they right? Or did everyone get the same amount?

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Here we are starting work on our Coast Miwok-inspired Kotcha. Keith sourced all the materials and came to school multiple times to help us construct! THANK YOU SO MUCH KEITH!!!! 

The students are digging out post holes:

Starting construction of the dome:

Lashing techniques:

We're finishing up on Wednesday afternoon!



My scientists are hard at work building dioramas of a tropical rainforest ecosystem. When we learn something new about the tropical rain forests, I pull out a bunch of supplies and ask them to figure out how to add it to their dioramas. Their finished dioramas will show their learning about the layers of the rainforests and other interesting features of the forests such as strangler vines, buttress roots, epiphytes, awesome rainforest animals, and more!

 Looking at the way bromeliads hold water and create a great habitat for small invertebrates: