 National History Day Competition  A sneak peak at NHD competition! CONGRATS Tommy! You made it to state! We can't wait to post your video on the Voyager!  Amazing work ladies! Now that's what I call project based learning! We learned so much about the explorers of the North Pole.  CONGRATS! You placed 4th in the SF Science Fair!  A day at the San Francisco Symphony  All smiles...as we return to school and make connections between math and violin music played by Beth. Thanks Beth!  Climbing trees at the Marin Hedlands   Sand at Rodeo Beach...How many colors of sand are at your favorite beach? |  Group yoga poses require team collaborative communication prior to striking the pose. Who knew the group poses would end up being the favorite!      Learning about PH and how to change base to acidic.  Let's compare PH strip colors: tap water; salt water; baking soda water and vinegar.  President's Fitness Challenge Crissy Field  Come on! You can do it! Just one more! Push!!!   The cool down - running through sprinklers..."That was awesome!" |  Hiking at Pacifica - Mori Point...to practice expressive story telling.  Students practiced telling a story of their experiences, using their senses, sequences of events and highlights. This supports expressive writing piece we practice so diligently in class.    Marshall Beach...students examined ocean currents as Marshall Beach fills up with many large pieces of debris.  Students examined tidal zones, erosion, learned about beach safety and climbed over 2000 steps.   |
Language Arts
Grammar: Grammar continued with its focus on Nouns (Singular Common, Singular Proper, Singular Possessive, Possessive Plural, and Plural Possessive). Students created colorful comic strips to help them remember the rules. At the end of the month, we began the next section on Verbs.
Writing: Students continued with writing persuasive essays and then worked on presenting their argument to the class. This time the topic was “Should there be homework.” We had a great in class debate, where, surprisingly, not all students chose that there shouldn’t be homework. The students also continued working on and finished up their Science Fair and National History day written work. Writing was focusing on how to write written research (to include background knowledge) and cite resources. Students also wrote their own first person account of their experience at the Wave Organ, which tied to science, literature, and being able to see different people’s perspectives of the same event.
Literature: We continued reading first person accounts of people during the Revolutionary War, both on the American and British sides, and from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. Later in the month, we began reading Aesop’s Fables and learning about using stories to convey a moral, using characterization of an animal to portray human characteristics.
Math
Group work explored STRATEGY! We practiced identifying and using the strategy supports before launching into solving problems. Everyone learned strategy before solving algebraic equations graphing more than and less than. Students also began graphing more than and less than.
Science
Two of our students placed 4th in the San Francisco Science Fair! Congrats MCS students!
We didn’t get to visit the Wave Organ in January because of stormy weather and high waves, but we were excited to visit in February and apply our understanding of sound waves to what we observed at the Wave Organ, and also continue developing our observation skills and writing our own first person accounts from our experience there.
February focused on Forces and Interactions. We explored this through working with magnets, and bouncing/crashing/rolling different size and weighted balls to observe Newton’s laws in action. We also took a trip to the Exploratorium to deepen our experience with forces and interactions, particularly with electric, magnetic, and gravitational forces.
We also went for our second visit to USF’s science teacher program, where students experienced physical science experiments, giving them the chance to learn through a variety of experiments, and for the USF student instructors to practice their skills.
Students also began their Ocean Ambassador program provided by The Marine Mammal Center. This program is a comprehensive 10 unit lesson emphasizing the NGSS Science Standards, with an emphasis on Marine Mammal health and the state of our oceans. My City School is the first LD school to pilot the program and we look forward to sharing our additional tools, resources and ideas to further support other classrooms that may need additional hands on learning ideas.
Students began their journey by learning about what The Marine Mammal Center does. We reviewed making observations of form rather than function, watched a video of harbor seals and took notes of observations in our field notebooks. Additionally, we reviewed the steps in the scientific process/method.
Next students learned about tracking marine mammals, practice mapping marine mammal routes using latitude and longitude coordinates and discussed a brief introduction to the different types of marine mammals helped by TMMC.
After the lessons we visited the center to learn more about the types of marine mammals helped by TMMC, and helped students attach to the bigger goals and mission of TMMC as well as where we’ll go with the lessons, which will support the final project focusing on conservation.
History
Our students participated in an in class Constitutional Role Play. Once the students had been assigned a people group to represent, they researched their group and what their opinions would be on who should have a right to vote and slavery. Then each student wrote their argument and counter arguments before role playing the parts of people represented in the original Constitutional Convention, such as Northern merchants and Southern farm/plantation owners, as well as people who were not represented, such as both free and enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, indentured servants, and women.
We also continued to learn about the US constitution and Bill of Rights, making connections to how we have agreed upon rules for our community, which we came up with together at the beginning of the year. We also continued reading about current events through reading Time for Kids.
Vocabulary/Concepts: federalism, dual sovereignty, separation of powers, checks and balances, separation of church and state
Executive Functioning
We practiced Critical Thinking and Problem solving techniques with activities like “A Fork in the road” by Wess Carol or by using our Visual Brainstorm challenge collection. Students are always required to describe in detail how they arrived at their solution. This supports expressive language, peer teaching, encourages flexible thinking from others who can’t immediately see it as well as builds confidence in trusting their intuition in learning. Additionally, we reviewed the key elements in note taking, to support the up and coming note taking in history. Students compared what information they easily locate and what information they have a harder time with. Most of our students identified the ‘why’ piece is the hardest to grasp.
Wellness
We stretched ourselves and all practiced finding our voice. This looked like learning how to raise our voices, firmly (from our core), getting more comfortable saying ‘no’ and finding our courage to ask our peers for what we need/want. While most of the students were nervous about these exercises, in the end each one of them said “it was good to dot it” or “I think this is kind of fun”.
Community Service
We returned for our second installment of supporting the SEED project with Save The Bay along the Martin Luther King shoreline. During our last visit, we had gotten to put small seedlings in individual containers, to keep growing until they were ready to be planted by the shore. At this visit, we were able to plant some of those very same plants by the shore. We learned about what birds and rodents make the bay marsh their home, and we even got to sample on of the marsh rodents favorite snacks, salt weed. We had an opportunity to collect trash from the marsh, where we found an unending supply of straws, bottle caps, and snack bags. Each of the students also shared ideas of how to clean up or prevent the pollution. It was awesome to see our young scientists using what they’ve learned in science class and apply it to this problem.
In between our PE clinics, we take time to freely explore the area we live in. This month students visited the Marin headlands, Hawk Hill, hiked to Rodeo beach from the Nike Missile Center, as well as took the President Fitness Challenge at the Crissy Field. Interested in learning more about the importance of spending time outside, look at this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/04/22/why-children-need-to-play-outside_n_7283282.html
As an added experience for Art, we attended a performance by the SF Symphony. Following the performance we discussed how the different pieces made us feel, and what it made us picture. Additionally, our Math expert, Beth played the violin for everyone and explained the connection between math and music.
RSS Feed