Askeland's Adventures - 2/24/2017

Good afternoon!

Here's our progress this week:

3/4 DEB - Students worked on their stories in their home classrooms until Friday, when we met again. We are continuing to publish our stories and our deadline to complete the books will be next week. Some students may bring the books home to work on over the weekend (their choice).

5/6 DEB - We continued working on our landmark case presentations. - Kirsten

5th Advanced Math - What we did these three days in math were: algebra with shapes to make algebraic expressions. We also worked on math vocabulary for explanations. - Evelin

6th Advanced Math - We created presentations with our table groups to explain ratio vocabulary and how to calculate it. We also created practice problems for classmates to solve. - Levin and Ken

Askeland's Adventures - 02/03/2017

Good afternoon! Here's an update from students:

3/4 DEB - We are very close to finishing our storyboard of our "Diary of a..." stories and we are about to write our final drafts. - Annie and Lucia

5/6 DEB - We researched five cases we wanted to do for our Landmark case and then chose one and started researching on that specific case. - Stefanie

5th Grade Advanced Math - We played integer war. we also worked with number lines, coordinate planes, and we learned absolute value. - Logan

6th Grade Advanced Math - We learned how to find the constant of proportionality with the equation y/x = k. We also graphed ratios to see if they were proportional. - Kirsten

5/6 DEB families:

• Students came up with an idea for "Challenges" each month for DEB.Students created a monthly challenge to work towards (completely voluntary) and the class will be voting on the winners at the end of each month. 
• This month, the first challenge is to create a DIY craft, relating to the seasons, using materials easily found at home or school (low-budget craft). 
• Students should complete the craft on their own at home and bring it to school for voting on Feb. 28. 
• These challenges should be up to the student to complete, it is not required. I just wanted to honor their creative ideas and ambition!

Askeland's Adventures - 1/27/2017

Good afternoon! Since conferences are coming up, I just want to communicate that you can please contact me if you would like to set up an individual conference. For students in my DEB classes, I will plan on sitting in with their classroom teacher's conferences unless you would like to schedule a separate conference. For math families, please contact me if you'd like me to join the classroom teacher's conference or if you'd like to set up a separate time (before or after teacher conferences) to discuss math. 

Here's what we worked on this week:

3/4 DEB - We wrote a story board and made a rubric for our "Diary of a ..." story, and we also switched seats. - Carly and Jason

5/6 DEB - This week in DEB, we made flyers for class contests and started to briefly research landmark cases that we might be interested to present. - Amneet

5th Grade Advanced Math - This week we took our pretest, learned about positive and negative numbers, absolute value, coordinate, and different types of numbers in the Real Number System. - Baraka

6th Grade Advanced Math - In 6th grade math, we started our unit on Ratios and Proportions. We learned about the concept of proportionality. We also learned about rate and unit rate. Finally, we learned how to properly say a ratio. - Dan

Notes:

• Special congratulations to Amneet and Levin, who did a wonderful job at the District Spelling Bee last night! They spent so much time practicing and really represented Meadowview well!

• Parents of math students should have received their students' Unit 2 Assessments in a manila envelope this week. Please look over the information and let me know if you have questions. As always, we learned on an accelerated and advanced schedule, so sometimes student scores take some time to adjust to the more challenging pace. Thank you to those of you who have already signed and returned the envelopes!

• In 6th grade math, I am going to be assigning more daily and weekly work. In order to be prepared for the upcoming tests, which will be 6th grade standards, I am assigning TenMarks review assignments. They are short, 5 problem assignments that students have one week to finish. I will also be assigning more daily homework of concepts from class. This is due to the fact that the rest of the year, we will be covering entirely new concepts to all students. If you have questions or concerns, contact me.  

Askeland's Adventures - 1/20/2017

Happy Friday!

Here's this week's update:

3/4 DEB: This week in DEB we worked on making our storyboards for our "Diary of a ________" books. We also made "What if...?" questions for our books and finished our research for our animals. - Holli

5/6 DEB: This week, we watched a re-enactment of parts of the Brown v. Board of Education case, so we could see how Supreme Court cases are tried. We reflected on how the world would be different today if that case had not occurred. Finally, we research on specific landmark court cases so we have some ideas of what cases we can research in-depth. - Ms Askeland (I forgot to ask a student for their summary!)

5th Grade Advanced Math: This week we took our retakes, our fluency, and did a little bit of algebra. We also did a bit of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing decimals. - Evelin

6th Grade Advanced Math: This week we completed our reteaching and took the Unit 2 Summative Assessment. We also completed the Real World Experience and our fluency tests. - Ms. Askeland

Next week we will begin our new units in 5th and 6th Grade Advanced Math: 

• In 5th Grade Math, we will start with Rational Numbers and then begin Expressions, Equations, and Inequalities.

• In 6th Grade Math, we will begin our study of Ratios and Proportional Relationships. 

• I will also begin assigning homework to keep our skills fresh for PARCC testing in April.

• Unit 2 tests will be sent home early next week.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Askeland's Adventures 1/12/2016

This week, we have been focusing a lot on reteaching in math and researching/building background knowledge in DEB. Here's what the students found important to share:

3/4 DEB - This week we worked on finding research for the "Diary of an Animal" books. We also read the book, Memoirs of a Goldfish. - Shane and Jason

5/6 DEB - This week in DEB we started the week off by playing icivics.org games on court cases. By the end of the week, we started focusing on the Brown v. Board of Education court case. - Amneet

5th Advanced Math - In math this week, we did our STAR math tests and Andrew got to present his reteach for converting units in the metric system, and we checked our Real World tests. - Andrew

6th Advanced Math - This week, we took our Unit 3 pre-assessment for ratios and proportions. By the middle of the week, we continued on reteach and extension work. At the end of the week, we worked on our Unit 2 Real World Experience (RWE). - Amneet.


Have a wonderful long weekend! See you Tuesday!

Summer's Here!

Don't forget to keep up your summer reading!

Simple Machine Design Challenge in 3/4 DEB

In our 3/4 DEB class, we are investigating how inventing is like exploring, and the last two Fridays we have been exploring how to design a simple machine. Today, students created pulley systems that could lift metal objects off of the floor.  Here are some pictures. I hope to post videos soon. So much great thinking going on today!