4R Experiences: Volume 6: 16 September 2016

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's irrigation... and a donkey.

This week proves that hard work pays off! Our writing sourcebook is well on its way. It has helped us craft our published pieces in writing, all of which reflect thought and evidence of revising to add adjectives and editing for proper spelling and correct punctuation. Fantastic work!

Ms. Sayyora, our amazing school librarian, joined us for research and geographic fun! She helped us identify different natural foods, e.g. pineapple, tomato, etc., and use World Book Online to find where our three favorite natural foods are grown. Each student then used an atlas to measure how far each food he/she chose travels to Uzbekistan. Students were truly amazed by the distances their food traveled, and learned how the cost of each food correlates to the distance the food travels. The further away from Uzbekistan, the more the food usually costs and vice versa. Thanks, Ms. Sayyora for helping us.

A week of fun must also include some craziness, so we used an emulsion (Kaymock 35%) and made some BUTTER! Yes, hard work does pay off. Besides our hands-on experience of shaking to create butter, we also journeyed a local farm. Students saw farming methods humans use to produce and harvest a variety of foods - and even some plants that are not usually eaten. Hint: They are colorful and smell wonderful!

Making butter is intense.

As a follow-up to our farm trip, we talked about the idea of food scarcity, or food availability. We focused mainly on what responsibilities we can have as humans to address how in developed countries, like in the United States, more than 1/4 America's food (96 billion pounds, or 43 billion kg) is wasted each year. How is this so? Who is responsible for this? Why are people still hungry? How does poverty connect with access to the foods we saw grown on our farm field trip?

While the farm trip was fabulous, can we really see what life is like to be a farmer in just a couple hours? To build our understanding of the challenges of growing food, we played a game called, 3rd World Farmer. We learned about many complications, such sickness, animal disease, civil unrest, corruption, war, and more that can influence a farmer's success. We survived for 16 turns, and by that we mean, we died after living for only 16 years. So, farming is complicated and presents many challenges even when we make balanced decisions. Where will we take this knowledge? How can we put it together to build something new, change our minds about the way things are, and take action that is lasting? Time will tell...

Thank you for reviewing and signing our math assessment. We began our new unit, Arrays and Shares, which digs deeper into the mathematical and operational relationships in our base ten system. Some thoughts shared during our Think/Write/Pair/Share time have been "5 x 6 is also like 6 x 5... repeated addition is a longer way to express multiplication..." Yeah, we are off to a great start!

Book Clubs begin this week, so stay tuned to the inter-workings of what REAL reading is all about!

Finally, some ANNOUNCEMENTS. We have our MAP reading assessment Tuesday and MAP math assessment Wednesday. What can you do to prepare them? Nothing. Do everything you already do. Be sure they get a full night's rest, eat a medium-sized breakfast (heavy breakfasts sometimes make us groggy and tired), and encourage them to do their best. If you have additional questions about the MAP tests, please email me.

Also, this Friday we have Parent-Teacher Conferences. They are a time to talk about initial impressions, share goals for the year, and ask questions. If you have any questions, please email me as well. Enjoy the week!

Homework

Read 20 minutes each night and...

Monday: Times and Travels & The Smallest Bear activities
Tuesday: New World, Old World activity
Wednesday: Math Grade 4 IXL D.2 & D.3
Thursday: Making a Difference & What Does Not Belong? activities
Friday: Ride a unicycle, while playing the bongos and drinking strawberry juice, as you read a book with three fingers. Oh, and enjoy the "fall" weather!

Ms. Sayyora helping us categorize and research the distance our food travels to us!

Someone doing an amazing job running community meeting.

Sometimes, don't you feel like creating a human array? Well, at least, "multiples" of humans?

What? We needed a break and decided to sit on each other.

Do you smell something? That's the smell of natural, home-made cow manure! We love poop!

Grape, anyone?

Can you pick a raisin?

Did you know there are fish farms in Uzbekistan?

Who will win in the battle of the smells: flowers vs. poop? You decide!

A nursery of color... flowers.

Farming needs a lot of water, so farmers use pumps from the Chirchiq canal to redirect water into these irrigation ditches. It's wet work, but someone has to do it.