September Week 1

I enjoyed meeting your students this week.  Here is a brief recap of what we did and what we will be doing. I will post any long-term projects/assignments here.

I have communicated to both classes the need to be humble and sensitive about what we do in class. We do not want other students to feel badly that they are not doing the various projects we will do in enrichment. Your students have the privilege and opportunity to challenge themselves in different ways and we want to make sure they are not "advertising" that privilege. If you can encourage them to be sensitive to others, that would be great. They will have wonderful opportunities to be leaders and actually involve their peers (who are not in the class) in some of our projects.

2nd/3rd grade Enrichment

  • Played ice breaker games
  • Introduced our "food" unit and the milk-fed pumpkin we will be watching grow. Also introduced the long-term project of building a worm bin. Next week, we will be researching the best way to do this and alsobrainstorming how to include some classes in composting.
  • Creative writing activity
  • Word analogies
  • Pencil math challenge
  • STEM- ice cream science and why the sky is blue, sunset is red...
4th/5th grade Enrichment
  • Played ice breaker games
  • Wrote on a journal topic
  • Completed challenge math on exponents and order of operations/ pencil puzzle
  • Learned about DNA traits through class inventory and extracting DNA from a strawberry
  • Introduced long term project of publishing a cookbook
  • Introduced long term project of researching a food issue and a solution (ie. what do restaurants do with "wasted" food? How do we reduce food waste? How do we encourage better food choices?)
  • Introduce possible participation in Odyssey of the Mind
  • Had 15-25 minutes of free choice (many of them chose to do homework from regular classes)

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