Mini swingset from math group.

Metaphor

Metaphor - a comparison between two things which are not literally connected.

Exp. - Mr. Berkey is a sleeping dog unable to move for anything but food.

I miss the kids AND we were shorted many dead animals in our dissection kit. An all-out investigation is currently underway. How are your times tables? Are you staying busy?

I'll check in again. Enjoy the solstice!

Mr. B

Catching Up The Blog

I've gotten behind in the blog lately. The kids have written some blog posts, and I will do my best to add them this weekend. Ever since conferences I feel like I'm running just to keep up with my sleep.

I never got last week's newsletter posted online. Since I had included instructions for the family project, I had kids all take home a paper copy so they would have instructions to keep. I will include last week's newsletter with this one so everyone has access to both.

I will send home electronic newsletters for those who receive them as soon as I am finished posting today's newsletter to the blog. The field trip was fantastic today. 100% of the kids went, and 100% of the kids did an excellent job of meeting every one of my expectations. We've come a long way, and I'm proud of this group.

Take Care Out There-

Mr. B

Arias and Emily N.'s blog post

Arias and Emily N.’s News

Math:

Today in Mr.Berkey’s math group, we all were working on the last parts of the playground equipment that we hot glued. We will also move on to division real soon. Hooray for quotients !

Reading:

During reading we went over our tall tales and Mr. Berkey took kids in the hall to go over their tall tales and how they can improve.

Georgie:

Mr. Berkey read George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt while we, the class, made our new homework journals. In the book, George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt, we discovered the reason that equations were made. We found out a man made an equation of the variable, N. What he was using it for was since N represents the amount of stars born each year in the milky way that’s why he used it. So that means equations in this example make things much easier.Thank you for that equations.Your a big help. Also this week on the blog me,Arias,has moved from D.L.E s to the blog for the first time ever ! Can you believe that ?

Dissecting:

And Mr. Berkey is going to be bringing in lots of animals to dissect, but we don’t quite know exactly when they will be coming in.
Next week news:

Next week December 9th we will be going to the Nutcracker. We will be watching our friend, Kate, perform.

Other that that it has been a great week!!

- Emily N. & Arias

Email Address

If you need my personal email for ANY reason, you can contact me at enterprisingberkey@yahoo.com!

Dissection Studies

Thanks to a generous donation from the Madrid family, and another donation from The Bank of Mrs. Berkey, we are awaiting the arrival of several dead animals to dissect.

Dissection can be a slippery subject, as the idea of death has different meanings for different families. To make a long story short, out of respect for those who wish to have no part of animal dissection, we will be holding a Saturday class for those families who are interested in dissection. There will be several choices for dissection, including, but not limited to, a perch, a squid, a shark, a big earthworm, a fetal pig, amongst other things. I also ordered us some scalpels and dissection pans so that we could do our studies correctly.

We finished making our homework journals, so look forward to those. Other big news: Mr. Berkey's class is taking a field trip before winter break. This is not usual behavior for me, but one of our student's will be performing in The Nutcracker, and there will be performances for school kids coming soon.

This class is an amazing group, and I look forward to seeing them impress general society as much as they impress me.

Take Care Out There-

Mr. B

Introducing the Independent Writers' Guild!

Following this text is "blogwork" from my Independent Writers' Guild who has been given the task of blogging daily classroom activities. There will be mistakes in this area, which I think is part of the process. The kids will see their mistakes, be able to go edit their mistakes, and learn about the writing process in a real way. I have not included all of the blogs (one wasn't finished), nor have I put the names of the students. The students and I will discuss how we want to deal with names. I hope you enjoy!

Cool Books!!

In the book we’re reading in class, George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt, it has gotten SERIOUS. A character named Annie has gotten a message from an E.T.!!!! It was strange since it happened right after Annie’s family saw a robot touch down on Mars mysteriously after losing contact for several minutes. Why were they at a space station you ask? Well Annie’s dad Eric is a scientist that studies space so..... yeah. It’s an interesting book series and you should read. It is by Stephen Hawking. Check it out. The first book is George’s Secret Key to the Universe. There is a Stephen Hawking website, that is cool too!!

FINALLY!!! maybe....

In Math we finished our models of the play ground! They looked great in the end after all that hard work!! The people who worked on the swings got to use some mini chains that were so adorable!!! Although it was a lot of hard work it really paid off. Especially working in groups because people don’t always agree....... it was still fun though!

*****

Iliev Math

Yesterday in Ms.Iliev’s at math we did a chapter test for chapter 6 which was about adding and subtracting fractions in the McDougall Litell math book. Also we did a pretest for chapter 7 which was about multiplying and dividing fractions.

Today in Ms. Iliev’s class we learned how to multiply fractions by whole numbers, while
Nyah did home design. Home design is our little class project this year, in other words, we’re building little cardboard models of houses.

Ileiv Reading

Yesterday we read a story from our Jr. great books. This story was called The Devoted Friend. In the story there’s a miller and a gardener. The miller is the gardener’s best friend. The miller promises his friend a wheel barrow. Then he makes the gardener do his dirty work based on that. During running the miller’s errands the gardener dies. He never even got the wheelbarrow.
Today in Ms.Iliev’s reading we reread The Devoted Friend, and marked vocabulary words. Then we looked up the definitions of the words we marked, and wrote them in our booklets.