November/ December

We are off to a great start in SPARK! I have loved getting to know students and am impressed with the effort and great thinking already happening in our classroom! I hope students are excited about our Royal Academy Adventure and our Medieval Times theme. Here are a few details about the work we have been doing in class.

Math: The Royal Academy

Students have been accepted into the "Royal Academy" and are seeking to become royal apprentices to the king. They have sorted into their house teams and the Thinkerdoodles, Turnblitzers, Thunderwits, and Trognoggins are all adding problem solving strategies to their tool belts as they proceed on a quest to find their swiped scepters. So far we have used the process of elimination and deductive reasoning to find where the scepters are hidden and then used organizing data in tables and guess and check in order to get past the trolls in the clearing on our journey. We will continue on our problem solving quest for the next 4 weeks and then use the skills we've acquired as we move into some differentiated activities with Math Superstars and Greg Tang resources.

Reading: Jacob's Ladder

Our first reading story in our Jacob's Ladder curriculum was the fable, The Ant and the Dove. Students have been growing their vocabulary and using the ladder to build skills in decoding and comprehension. 

Our skill focus so far has been to:

• Develop prediction and forecasting skills by analyzing text.
• Sequence events from a text in logical order, identify cause and effect relationships, recognize consequences and implications, predict future events, and judge probable outcomes.
• Develop deductive reasoning skills in order to make general statements spanning a topic or concept. 

Project Based Learning: Medieval Times Projects 

We got in the spirit last week with some middle ages activities!  First students created their own helmets with aluminum foil, which took a day's share of problem solving.  There was definitely some creative design thinking at work!  Then we mounted our horses to compete in a jousting tournament.  We had some pretty impressive pool noodle lance wielders!  Lastly, students created their own catapults. Wrapping up the day, students did online investigations of castles, got to choose their knightly names, and began their Chess sketchbooks which will serve as the first phase of our project. As the project progresses, students will learning about the roles and history of the chess pieces and then complete a class study of the book Knights and Castles by Mary Pope Osborne. Putting into practice their learning from the text students will have choice in creating pieces for their own castle lap books. Finally after a study of reader's theater, students will write and present their own scripts based on life in Medieval Times.

Growth Mindset:

We start each day with a morning Jumpstart activity. So far we are building skill at finding relationships between analogy pairs.  We have also done a short study on the brain and focused on ways to maximize our learning. Students got to "touch a brain" and test the idea that challenges help the brain grow by trying out a variety of games that help build perseverance and scaffold their critical thinking skills.