Upcoming Dates:
No School on Friday, October 5 - TBS Professional Development Day
No School on Monday, October 8 - Indigenous People's Day

4th Grade Math: Today we worked with the Cuisenaire Blocks to reacquaint ourselves with fractions. We talked about 1 whole, 1/10, 2/5, 1/2 and a few other fractions. We're looking forward to doing more work with these rods throughout the year.

We started off the day with a CerritoBerry meeting and worked with groups through a survival simulation. After learning that the group had been in a plane crash, students were asked to rank the importance of a number of items in order to survive. It was a lively discussion with many ideas!
We wrapped up our state spelling for the week with an short quiz on the states and then began a writing project based on our read aloud book, The Neddiad by Daniel Pinkwater. We'll continue to work on this writing through the next couple of weeks.

If some of you recall, at Back to School Night we shared the wonderful class meeting discussion we had around interest groups and hobbies. Well, this week we put it into action and had our first "open classroom" recess where some groups met and discussed their interests and others used to time to explore our art materials. Very cool!

Mythology Group

 Paper Airplane Group

 Some students are in both groups.

 The famous paper hat.

REMINDER! State Spelling Quiz TOMORROW on Illinois-Mississippi.
 
Homework:
5th Grade Math - Please visit Cerrito's Blog
4th Grade Math -  No homework this evening due to our assessment today.
State Spelling: Spelling study sheet, Illinois-Mississippi for state quiz TOMORROW.

Upcoming Dates:
No School on Friday, October 5 - TBS Professional Development Day
No School on Monday, October 8 - Indigenous People's Day


4th Grade Math: Today another group of students began the ongoing activity that all students will participate in called The 9 Lines.  This is a multi-sensory approach to teaching the multiplication facts developed by David Berg of Making Math Real. We also worked with number tiles to practice problem solving and refresh our place value knowledge. Afterwards, we assessed the progress in multiplication, subtraction, and addition with an assessment.

Kate and Stephen came in for our Class Meeting today and taught the game "Elbow Tag". Linked with a partner, everyone tries to escape the touch of the tagger and the tagger runs from the runner. Sounds complicated, but it was actually very fun. We look forward to adding it to our bank of games. We continued our State Study this afternoon, diving deeper into our research and map making. 

Homework:
5th Grade Math - Please visit Cerrito's Blog
4th Grade Math -  Option 1 (subtraction practice) or Option 2 (story problem using multiplication).
State Spelling: Spelling study sheet, Illinois-Mississippi for state quiz on Friday.

Upcoming Dates:
No School on Friday, October 5 - TBS Professional Development Day
No School on Monday, October 8 - Indigenous People's Day

4th Grade Math:  Work in class today included writing new story problems for multiplication arrays and playing multiplication math games to practice facts.  Thanks to Mark (parent of a 4th grader) for helping students as they wrote their problems.  One group of students began an ongoing activity that all students will participate in called The 9 Lines.  This is a multi-sensory approach to teaching the multiplication facts developed by David Berg of Making Math Real. 

We continued our Spot Writing at Strawberry Creek Park during Writer's Workshop today. Many students chose to sit next to the creek-- the observations and descriptions of what they saw/heard/felt were all amazing!

Spot Writing

Homework:
5th Grade Math - Please visit Cerrito's Blog
4th Grade Math -  Writing a story problem using multiplication.
State Spelling: Crossword for Illinois-Mississippi

Upcoming Dates:
No School on Friday, October 5 - TBS Professional Development Day
No School on Monday, October 8 - Indigenous People's Day

Spot Writing:  We walked over to Strawberry Creek park to day to begin an ongoing writing activity.  We began by reading the book, The Other Way to Listen, by Bryd Baylor and Peter Parnall.  The story follows a young person who seeks advice from an "old man" who can hear rocks and lizards talk by being patient.  By spending time in one place over and over again the young person finally hears the hills sing to him.  Our project parallels this story to some regard.  Today the students selected their "spots" at the park that we will revisit each week to write observations, thoughts, ideas and stories inspired by time in one place in nature.

4th Grade Math:  Today the students practiced creating a story problem (word problem) based on photographs of items displayed in rectangular arrays.  Writing story problems can be quite challenging, and are aimed at helping students identify the math that is happening and how to express it in words.

States Bingo and Writing

Homework
4th Grade Math Homework: Option 1 or Option 2

5th grade Math Homework: Homework packet is in two parts: Mon-Wed; Wed-Fri
Please see Cerrito's blog (in helpful links) for more details.  


State Spelling: This week the new state names will come home in a word search as homework today, a crossword puzzle tomorrow and the state name list on Wednesday for spelling practice.  Here is a link to a state and capital reference sheet.

4th Grade Math: Today the students warmed up with a multiplication array game called, Boxed In followed by a multiplication fact review of all of the tables 1-9.  We then began our look at pictures of real life "arrays," which we will work with tomorrow to develop multiplication story writing skills.


Today in Strawberry

States Bingo- To kick off this weeks group of state names we played States Bingo using interesting facts about each state as a clue. 

Writing prompt activity:  Students were given a yellow slip of paper with a writing prompt, such as, "When I stepped out the door . . ."  to begin a quick write story.  During the writing process new slips of paper including animals, forms of transportation and select adjectives were dropped in front of them by the teachers.  The goal for the writer is to find creative ways to include the new bits of information into the story they have going (at the same time to not stop writing).

Endeavor Fly Over

Reminders:

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  So far we only have photo orders from half of the students!

 

Today in Strawberry

 

After a rousing game of Wells Fargo (similar to capture the flag) at the park with Cerrito we had a brief start to math class.  Knowing the shuttle, Endeavor was due to fly over at 9:30 we all headed to the Middle School deck to observe the event.  See photos below to follow our story for the remainder of the day!

 

Waiting for Endeavor . . .

 

and waiting . . .

 and waiting . . .

 FINALLY!

 It looked to be even closer than this as it first passed over!

 Practicing the states spelling.

 Reading our poems and adding more appreciation stickies.

 Recess at the park

 

 

 Have a great weekend!

 

 

Back To School Night is Tonight!

Good Evening! We are looking forward to seeing you all here at The Berkeley School tonight. Since tonight is Back To School Night (and we have plenty of information for you) this blog post will be short and sweet-- we will leave the announcements and information for our evening tonight!

Reminders:

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Also, it is strongly encouraged to practice spelling the state names, especially the ones that are circled in green! 

We had a guest appearance from Sima this morning in math to teach us a new game, Boxed In. This game re-emphasized our work with arrays and finding the factors of different numbers. 

Back To School is Tomorrow Night!

Homework

Reading - 20 minutes.  Be sure to record the Title and pages read in your planner (this year's version of a reading log).

State Spelling- Practice spelling the State names (Alabama-Idaho). Spell twice and say the word out loud to learn the spelling of state names by Friday.

4th Grade Math:  Option 1 (Things that come in groups) or Option 2 (Arrays challenge).

Reminders:

Back to School Night is tomorrow evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here! 

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

 

4^th Grade Math: Today we started math with a Quick Image warm up. Students were shown a group of dots for three seconds and then were asked to recreate the dots in the correct formation. The purpose of this exercise was for students to see how other’s think of numbers and how to form different types of equations with the same answer. After our warm up, we got back together with our partners to work on arrays.

Today in Strawberry

We continued to work on our poems, perfecting them in our final drafts. Many of the students have gotten so into writing poems they’ve written two, some three!

This afternoon we met with our buddies from Laurel Creek. Buddy partners worked together to create a collaborative drawing. They were asked to communicate with each other and make sure that both partners had marks on all four quadrants of the paper. Many of our buddies learned new drawing techniques from each other and created some beautiful drawings!

Buddies:

Homework

Reading - 20 minutes.  Be sure to record the Title and pages read in your planner (this year's version of a reading log).

 

State Spelling- Practice spelling the State names (Alabama-Idaho). Spell twice and say the word out loud to learn the spelling of state names by Friday.

4th Grade Math Homework: Option 1 and Option 2     Information about Unit 1.

5th Grade Math:  Please check Cerrito Creek's blog for an overview of 5th grade math homework.

Reminders:

Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home Friday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!  

4th Grade Math:  Today we dove further into our study of arrays and how they relate to multiplication. We used colored tiles to represent multiplication factors and then split in to partners to work further with arrays. Partner pairs worked together to cut out grid paper arrays and learned how to make factor rainbows. Students chose Option #1 or Option #2 for homework. Along with the homework, students took home a blue letter informing families of the unit we will be studying in math. 

Today in Strawberry
We started out this morning with our creative hats on. Students walked into the room and sat at a table with old tools and antique machines-- they spent 20-25 minutes drawing "still life" photos, concentrating on details and pencil techniques. 

We continued to work on our poems during Writer's Workshop and even got to some final drafts!

During Reading Workshop, we reviewed the parts of a paragraph and how to write a quality topic sentence. 

We began our State Study this afternoon. Students chose a state to research and used the school laptops to find information on their state. Between Cerrito and Strawberry Creek, we will cover all the states and we're looking forward to hear all about them!
Morning Drawing Activity
 




State Research Project

Monday September 17th

Welcome back to school!

No homework assigned tonight due to Rosh Hashanah.

Reminders:
Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home yesterday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!

4th Grade Math: Arrays, arrays arrays!  This week we will be exploring mathematical arrays as they relate to multiplication.  We are also exploring different ways to show numbers, such as 425 using operations (i.e. 40+60+200+70+55).

Writing Workshop: The students picked up from lour work last week and continued to create topic webs to use for creating poems related to family and friends.

Sentence study:  During our language arts time today we reviewed sentence structure, identified the key features of a complete sentence and corrected sentences.   

Correcting sentences:

 

Happy Friday!

Reminders:
Picture Day is Monday, September 24th. Forms went home yesterday with photo package details and general information about picture day.  

Back to School Night is Thursday evening, September 20, 6:00-8:00pm.  We look forward to seeing you here!



Two more firsts for our start of the school year:

1st Cerritoberry meeting:  Strawberry and Cerrito Creek come together each Friday morning for activities and games.  Today we went outside to play group games including, "Giants, Wizards & Elves."

1st Friday Academic Flex:  On Fridays after lunch we conduct a homework planner check (currently doing this each day as well) to be sure students are keeping up on their reading log and assignments.  Academic Flex is a time for students to finish incomplete assignments before moving on to "choices."  Today we went straight to choices in order to introduce sewing, painting and modeling clay as possible activities to select from.  Several students began making pillows while others worked on the map puzzle, the community agreements poster, read, drew or played games.

Writer's workshop:

 A writing project focused on friendships, family and ourselves

 Flex time: planning a pillow

 Decorating our community agreements poster

 Sewing