by Dave Rodich
Spring, as it always is in school life, has been a bittersweet time in the Eagles. The focus is on sending the fifth graders off to new adventures and preparing the fourth graders for leadership roles next year as the oldest kids in the school. Each student is different and has different areas of growth in their social, emotional and academic development.
Dominating this time of year is the play. I’m so proud of what we as a school have done in writing this play. This script was authentically created by kids from 5 - 11 years old, coming from a genuine place of activism regarding soil health and environmentalism. It’s no small task for one person, let alone a whole school of students and teachers, to write a play. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of, and it served as a practice field for all of the social emotional work we do at the school - cooperating, being assertive, active listening, empathy and practicing self-control. It was a great way for the students to flex their creativity and create such cool vignettes.
In ELA, we continued with the digital class newspaper ‘The Fox’s Word’. We used Canva, which was a really cool platform for the students to explore graphic design as well as a multitude of various writing styles. Integrating with our Social Studies unit on the Neolithic Revolution, the students also wrote persuasive essays about the possible repatriation of ancient artifacts. It was heartening to see all the work we’ve done on short response writing via Return to Sender show up in their paragraph formation of their persuasive essays. Finally, the fifth graders used the same essay structure to write their graduation speeches.
In Math, we continued our work with fractions - identifying, comparing, ordering, computing across the four operations, and reducing using GCF. We then moved on to ordering and computing with decimals and converting to and from benchmark fractions. Finally, we transitioned to working with percentages, learning how to convert from decimals and find percentages of numbers by multiplication and by using a relationship to 100.
Explore. Discover. Learn
Some of our adventures this winter:
Bike Day!
Open Mic 2023
Visit to Second Chance Animal Shelter
Spring Zephyr Saturday School Day