Blog Update by Taji and Brie

An affinity group is when a bunch of people come together who have something in common.  Last week we started race based affinity groups (RBAG).  We started in the gym with all the kids in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.  Laura, our ethics teacher, spoke about affinity groups and Rama interrupted Laura with a dance.  All of the teachers started to dance with Rama out of no where!  It was AWESOME!  We loved affinity groups.  After the groups met, we were able to talk about it.  We talked about the norms of the groups and how we felt about coming together with 4th and 5th graders.  At first we thought this would be hard.  After doing it for the first time, we feel really excited that we know other kids now and we feel more confident that we can share anything we want to in the group.

This is a video of the teachers dancing to “All About the Race”.  Enjoy!

Here is the official video that was posted by Rama:

Weekly Update from Caleb and Zachary

Week of January 15, 2015

In Woodshop we are learning how to wood burn so we can make lummi sticks and to make decorations we are going to wood burn on the sticks. Lidia is teaching us how to wood burn during woodshop. The tools are extremely hot so we have to be careful so we have to wear gloves and the tools are delicate. One is broken but it works well for making circles and different shapes like curvy lines and waves.

In science we are making a document about our trees and how they function. We are also learning the measurements of our tree, like how tall and how wide. 

In math we are learning addition and subtraction algorithms. Some people are also working on a big word problem like the ECFS bicycle picnic problem.

We have two trips we are looking forward to! We are going to the Natural History Museum and Greenbrook Sanctuary to hike. The Sanctuary was supposed to be a surprise but we found out. Ooops! We were told to bring a lunch, I wonder why. :)

In Social Studies Workshop we are starting to bead on our tunics. We already inked our design on the tunics so now we are beading over the design. We made these for the winter assembly.

In Art we are supposed to draw the details of trees and sky. Corinne is helping us think about the details needed of the type of tree we are making. For example, if it’s a climbing tree it needs to have branches in certain places.

In P.E. we are doing a lot of fitness and basketball. In ethics we are going into groups of our race to talk with 4th & 5th graders.

We are learning the names of our body parts in spanish.

In library we are doing book talks about books we have read.

Have a good 3 day weekend!

Happy New Year! (Last Week's Blog Post) - Cassidy and Andrew

Welcome to the first blog of 2015!  How was your winter break?  Ours were great!

In Social Studies, we started a new read aloud called Lightfoot.  It is about a boy named Lightfoot and he lived in an Iroquois Tribe.  We’ve only heard the first chapter so far and we listened to an audio of Harry reading the chapter.

In science, we’re learning how to use microscopes.  We looked at magazines, pencil shreds, pine needles from the Eastern White Pine Tree, and some other things.  When we looked at the magazines, we saw that the words and pictures were made out of dots.  The Eastern White Pine also had dots for taking in carbon dioxide.

Click here to do a word search. The word search has words from our Native American study in it.