Home Depot Field Trip

Home Depot Field Trip

Yesterday we headed off to the Home Depot for a field trip to get some prices on our lumber and other materials for the sandbox project.  Thank you to Fred Meyer and Jaime DeLong for coming with me.

Fred did an AWESOME job of helping the kids understand the different things we were going to need and how we would construct it.  He even created little examples in the aisle of  Home Depot.

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It was exciting to see our brainstorming and ideas starting to come together.

From her we went to the place where we would most likely get our sand and they showed us where it was an gave us a visual of how much we would need.  Sam has calculated the volume of the box as 10 cubic yards.  Their "little" dump truck holds 6 so we will need a full one and a partial.  It is a LOT of sand.

Today in class a group of students spent some time calculating the total cost of the wood.  They are preparing ideas for their presentation to the Board in a few weeks.

Thanks for your support on this project.

Portfolios and Student Work

Portfolios and Student Work

In our class students do a variety of types of work.  Some traditional paper and pencil, some group work and some discussion work.  My goal this year is to collect a quality sample of the work that each student completes and have them reflect on their work.  

Since we are collecting our work to put in our portfolios there won't be a lot of work coming home on a daily/weekly basis.  What you will see is a bunch of work coming home at the beginning of the new month.  

We just completed our first month and work selection.  Students selected a math and a literacy sample that they liked and really wanted to keep.  They did a short reflection and then the rest of the work was sent home (I hope you saw this).  

If you are curious what your child has been doing let me know.  

Star Gazing- Solstice Park

Star Gazing - Solstice Park

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us on Friday for star gazing.  It was really cool to see the kids apply their research knowledge to the sky.  They were able to find the North Star, Big Dipper and a few planets.  If you didn't make it I would encourage you to take your kiddos outside and see what they know.  They spent a lot of time doing some research.  In addition to some star gazing it was just nice to spend time as a group outside of the classroom. 

Here are some pictures of our evening out.  (Sorry they aren't great - it was pretty dark).

Sandbox Update

Sandbox Update

We have been hard at work planning our sandbox.  This week with the help of Fred Meyer we were able to come up with some real dimensions and possibly costs of the sandbox.  The kids created a list of necessary materials and are excited to begin the actually construction.

Our next steps are:

• Field Trip to Home Depot - cost out the project (Monday or Tuesday next week)
• Review our cost and decide if that is reasonable or not and make adjustments as needed.
• Prepare a presentation for the Bridge School Board of Directors.  This will include visuals and written proposal.  I will provide more info as the date gets closer, but I would love students to come and present this to the board since it is their work.  
• Begin building.  :)

Through this project we are learning the following:

• Team Collaboration - having discussions, politely disagreeing and respecting each others opinions to come to a solution.
• Math Skills - area, perimeter, measurement, addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, metric conversions and money.  These are all applied at a level that is appropriate for your child.  Giving them enough challenge to learn new things, but not lead to frustration.  

Sorry - no pictures.  We are SUPER busy planning!

Thanks for your support!  

Planning for Star Gazing

Star Gazing

Today with the help of Chris Yeargin we begun the planning for our class star gazing trip on Friday.  We talked about what we might see, what we hoped to see and were left with some questions.  The class took some time looking in books, looking online and having a discussion about various aspects of the trip.

Chris will be back on Thursday and we hope to answer the following questions:

If you child wants to work on this at home it would be great.  Several mentioned that they had a book or other tool that they wanted to bring in and share and that would also be great.

We are all very excited for Friday.  I hope you can make it!