Volume 28: 10 April 2016

What is an artifact? How do we look at objects? How objects express who we are as people and human society as a whole? These are just some of the questions we have been tackling in our unit of inquiry, How We Express Ourselves. Through examining a drinking vessel, we have organized our questions about objects into five categories: Function, Physical Features, Design, Value, and Construction. These distinct categories have their own definition, but they do overlap. What matters is the perspective, or lens, you are looking from. We will continue to use these five categories throughout our study, so we have a common language to discuss our perspectives, lives, and work. Students continue to bring in a variety of different objects and share them during our community meeting in the morning. They can do this throughout the unit, and beyond.

Our study of geometry has taught us note-taking requires much more thinking than we thought before. We need the capture the heart of what we are reading, then support it when details and keywords. This skills is essential for 5th grade, reading, writing, organizing ideas, and life in general. Of course, we balanced this skill with some kinesthetic activities, like trying to create as many two-dimensional polygons with only our bodies. What fun! We continue our study by exploring angles, triangles, lines, and formulas to calculate the volume a three-dimensional object later this week.

Our study of the world of poetry has been expansive, original, and tons of fun. All week we looked at what poetry is and what it is not, the types of poetry out there, and the tools poets use to create works of art. As we learned these things, we explored books to find examples and non-examples of such poetic devices as assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, metaphor, simile, alliteration, personification, figurative language, rhyming couplets, etc. Also, we have written haiku, cinquain, and free verse poems in our study of the forms of poems. This week, we continue our examination of poems and will create an original poem to perform from memory this Thursday! Enjoy the week!

HOMEWORK

Read 20 minutes each night. Additionally, if you have time after these reading exercises, you have two choices:

1.  Do extra research on that artifact.  Put in on a sheet of paper, or in the margins of your homework.

2.  Do extra geometry IXL.

Monday:  Automobile reading exercise

Tuesday:  Airplanes reading exercise

Wednesday:  Make sure you have completed section W.  Go on to X.  Do your best!  

Thursday: Two exercises:  Printing press and Review sheet!

Friday:  Enjoy the warmth.  Ride a bike.  Throw a ball outside and see who catches it!