"PEEK at PEAK"
September 10, 2013
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PEAK NEWS
PGD: Short Term Goals
- Each day, students write a daily goal and then write an evaluation whether the goal was met. Students also rate their individual progress on a scale of 1- 5 in four areas: math, topic study, theme study, and science. The areas rated are: persistence, on-task behavior and good thinking. We will share these goal sheets at conferences. I met with each student at the end of the day to look over their goal sheet and provide feedback.
- We are still deciding on a class slogan and symbol --- discuss with your child possible slogans for our class. We have one turned in thus far --- we are loud and proud.
- We did not have a chance to finish our S'More posters: "What Object Am I?" If your child would like to finish this, he/she can finish at home. Then your child can can send me the link so I can work on our finished class copy to publish. I will allow 20 minutes to finish this next week --- so it is not due --- just an option if they would like to work on it at home.
Critical Thinking:
- We were introduced to the word –precision! We watched an precision video and used the word throughout the day! I tried my hand at new technology! Here is a link to our video: PRECISION
Elements of Reasoning Skills: Purpose & State the Question:
- Purpose (review): All thinking should start with a purpose, a goal, or an end in sight. We discussed how to define our purpose in all subject areas. We will continue to use this element of reasoning throughout the year.
- State the question (review): This will lay out the problem we are examining and guide our thinking/ Questions to ask ourselves: What question am I trying to answer?/ Is the question clear? We applied this level of thinking in topic study as students hone in on an essential question to research.
Enrichment Centers:
- Topic Study: Today we continued to use our new technology tool---- Padlet. This tool will help the students take notes in topic study. Today we worked on writing an essential question for our topic study. Students also logged into GOOGLE DOCS and updated my topic study spreadsheet. This will be an ongoing checklist for me to measure where students are in the note taking and project producing process. Please ask your child to show you the Google Doc.
- Math: We had a successful day of math problem solving! The math problem this week is very difficult ---ask your child to tell you about it! We talked about grit – how to stick with something when it is HARD!
- Science: Today we averaged our science experiment trials and learned how to complete a group write up about the experiment on Google Docs. We also learned how to Graph using the create a graph tool on my "PEAK PAD" (click here). We will finish our science write up next week. There is a lot to learn!
Theme Study:
- Students explored a variety of books and websites --- we are trying to discover brain topics of interest to us. Students took notes on possible brain topics. Please discuss possible topics at home.
- We took a note taking quiz --- Click on the link below if you would like to review our note taking procedure. We did fabulous on our note taking quiz!
- We reviewed databases, kid friendly search engines, how to narrow search strings (using the advance research in the Google gear icon).
- We also discussed the perils of the world wide web and questions to ask ourselves to determine accuracy and precision. Our purpose: To search for Truth on the Internet.
HOMEWORK:
HOMEWORK:
- Finish "What Object Am I" S'more Poster (optional)
- I am also sending a link to Drop Box. Please have your child load this on to your home computer --- this is a virtual box. Your child will be able to put work from school into the Drop Box and then work on it at home! WE worked on this at school today --- we loaded Drop Box on to the school computers --- students saved one item to the Drop Box. Now he /she is going to experiment with opening it at home and making a change to the document and then saving it to Drop Box. Drop Box has tutorials but the kids can learn through trial and error as well! I am testing Drop Box to see if it will be easier to work on documents from school than using the H drive on the LPS site. We are learning together!
- Your child should open his/her email and show you his/her topic study topic and complete what he/she can on the chart. --- this requires typing answers onto the spreadsheet ---EASY!