Newsletters

• Students began Encounters by completing a HOTS (higher order thinking skills) sheet.  

• Students practiced math skills with magic number squares and solved riddles.  

• Students wrote their own names in Cuneiform which is an ancient language of Mesopotamia.  

• Finally, students had fun working together in groups to see which group could build the tallest fuzzy stick tower. 

Week of September 4 - 

• Each week students enjoy studying a different quote.  The students guess the missing words from a quote.  This week's quote was "The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the are there to show how badly we want something. "  Students discussed what types of things could be brick walls.  

• Students carved their names which were written in Cuneiform into a clay disk.  The students were surprised by the way the clay felt.  We had read how clay was used to make bricks that built large ziggurats in Samaria.

• We learned that good note taking requires practice.  Students read note taking tips with a partner.

• Students assembled a card stock ziggurat.  It was challenging, but we did it!

• The Wednesday and Thursday classes earned a popcorn party because 100% of the students returned completed homework!

Week of September 11 - 

• We continued learning about note taking by matching common abbreviations to the terms they represent. 

• Students learned about castles and worked in groups to build a castle with notecards.  

• We learned interesting details about Greek and Roman Architecture.  

Week of September 18 - 

• Here's a surprising thing we learned about Egyptian Architecture:  It was concerned more with the living than the dead.

• After learning a little about Egyptian mummies, each student carved a face on a small apple, weighed and measured the apple and covered it in baking soda and salt.  We will be weighing, measuring and observing our apples for the next few weeks.  

• Did you know that Egyptians were not the only ones who mummified their dead?

Week of September 25 - 

• Students completed a pretest on B.C. and A.D. times.  Ask your student what other terms we learned to describe time. 

• Students picked a card with a date and an event and then everyone in the class arranged themselves into a human timeline.

• Students worked in Centers using stamps to write their names in hieroglyphs, drawing a scale model sarcophagus and weighing and measuring the apples we have been mummifying.

Week of October 2 -  We began studying the architecture of the Ancient Greeks.  Students learned about the different column types.  We also learned the terms BC/BCE-AD/CE and how to arrange events on a timeline.  We continued to study different architecture types.  

Week of October 9 - The students started to narrow down the research topics by identifying types of architecture which particularly interested them.  We played Kahoot about BC/BCE - AD/CE.  Students enjoyed a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Architecture and Math) experiment to determine which shape can support the most weight.

Week of October 23 - Students began studying about Gothic architecture and gargoyles.  Students have chosen a particular building to continue in depth research.  We made gargoyles from salt dough.

Week of October 30 - We began independent research and learned about writing SMART goals to guide their research.  Students  showed their creativity  by designing their own gargoyle habitats.