MIA Mr. Berkey

Families -

I wasn't in today, Monday (8/27) because I was in math training all day. If everything went as planned, the students worked on making their homework journals today. The journals will be ready to be tested later in the week. We will be Modge Podging the covers tomorrow.

I hope everyone got out and enjoyed the beautiful weather on Sunday. I'll write more soon.

Adam Berkey

Solar System Scope

Solar System Scope, an interactive 3D exploration of our solar system

Some fun sites for exploring and learning about our solar system.

• http://www.solarsystemscope.com/  A site that lets you explore and examine planets in our solar system.  My two favorite aspects of this site is that it displays the current locations of all the planets according to the current time.  Something that used to annoy me in school was they would always have charts showing the solar system, but the size and distances (from the sun) would always be incorrect because to make an accurate depiction of our solar system with distances taken into account the planets would only be small pinpoints on the map.  On the left side of the interface there is a gear that will bring up these options and allow you to set it up so the planets are easier to see, or to make it all accurate with size and distances.  Of course if you do slide the bars over to accuracy all the planets shrink down to small pinpoints because our solar system is that vast.
• http://www.sunaeon.com/#/solarsystem/ Is the main page of Solar System Scope and lets you zoom into different planets where it will give you a detailed explanation of what makes up each planet and allows you cut away the layers to see what the planet's core looks like. 

Hope you have some fun with the exploring the solar system.

Another Year In 4th/5th Grade

How Does A 5th Grade Teacher Become a 4th/5th Teacher?

This is an interesting question, but it comes with a fairly boring answer. The simple fact is our team needed someone to make a sacrifice and the other fifth grade teacher is new to our school. It would have been terrible behavior on my part to demand that Ms. Munroe (our new wonderful addition) take the class.

Besides, here's a little secret. I don't believe that we should really be treating kids too much by their grades. Every fifth grade I've taught had fifth graders with third-grade writing skills or fourth grade math skills. This did not change the way I taught them, just the place we started. As always, I'll start some kids in one area and some kids in another.

The first day of class was wonderful. You've got some talkative kids, but I guarantee you that we will figure out a solution to this problem. It will take work from everyone but we'll get things running smoothly.

For transparency reasons, my room is not at its most beautiful right now. Parents who have been through a year with me already assumed this would be the case. My room is an ever-changing space and I am on journey to create the ultimate learning space. I'm getting closer, but there's much more work to do.

I have much, much more to explain to you, but I'm tiring quickly.

Take Care Out There -

Adam Berkey