Newsletter #5 Welcome to week 5! The students and I have started reading The Golden Goblet
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this week as a class. We have made some connections between the theme of the novel and the shared elements of a Cinderella story, better known as a Rags to Riches story which ​refers to any situation in which a person rises from poverty to wealth​. This week the students studied Ancient Egyptian numerals. Understanding the value of these new numbers was a difficult task since they are not the common numbers our students are used to seeing. The Ancient Egyptian numbers are actually shapes and symbols that represent the numbers 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, & 1,000,000. The challenge I gave the students was to create a sign using the Egyptian numerals to represent their birthdays. See if you can spot your child’s birthday! Egypt! As for Egypt this week we have added our shutters and Egyptian landscape to the small window of our class. After looking at Ancient Egyptian pottery we decided to sketch out our own images of pottery that we would like to create! The students then wanted to create some form of clay to build their original pottery so we made Play­Doh. The process of creating our own Play­Doh was very interesting, the students found a recipe to follow and had to take that one recipe and figure out how to make enough for the entire class. During this process the students were able to use their math skills to understand how much more flour, water, and salt they would need to sculpt their own pottery! Further into our Egyptian exploration this week the students focused on the Nile River. They asked questions like how long is it, where does it start/ end, and is it salt or fresh water that runs through it? We decided to take the last question home for home exploration and found out that, the Nile river is filled with fresh water that flows through Egypt. Once the students returned back with their answers another question came up, How does the Nile river flowing through Egypt have fresh water when it flows in from oceans and seas that are filled with salt water? So in the upcoming week we will be looking into the filtration system of the Nile river and the difficulties the people of Egypt deal with when it comes to polluted drinking water. Lastly, the students have been working on their mini research papers at school. We have been taking time to write, edit, and enhance our writing by working in peer editing groups as well as one on one question time with me throughout the week. I believe this has been beneficial for all of the students. They are able to come in with questions and are guided by their peers and myself to find a resolution to their issue. We have made lots of progress on our papers and are planning on finishing them up next week! I hope that you have a great weekend, Ms. Alexandra ~You have BRAINS in your head. You have FEET in your shoes. You can STEER yourself any direction YOU choose. ­Dr.Seuss