Our garden is growing!

Making personal connections to books facilitates deeper reading comprehension and understanding.  The sixth year students planted a community garden as a response to reading the book  Seedfolks by Paul Fleishman.  The book focuses on the diverse lives of characters living in the inner city of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  The community is forever changed when a young girl plants some seeds in a run down, garbage filled, vacant lot.  The students chose seeds that held meaning to themselves or their families and have been watering and watching daily to see if we can share a community experience.  Finally, after much tending, the seeds are starting to grow.  Now the real nurturing begins.  

Adjectives are in BLOOM!

Students have spent the past weeks ridding their vocabulary of words that are boring and “dead”.  Words like cool, awesome, and nice, need to be “weeded” out to make way for new growth.  During grammar, students were able to act out adjectives like annoyed, radiant, stunning, and awkward to demonstrate the emotions associated with descriptive language. 

In writing, students are preparing to write suspenseful stories.  They have been listening to readings of classic literature to find and borrow haunting, weary, and dreary words to give the reader a bone-chilling experience.

The “root” of scientific classification begins with the six kingdoms of life.  The students of E6 spent the week learning how scientists classify all living things.  After note-taking and discussion, students ended the unit dining at the “Kingdom of Life Buffet”, make sure to ask them what was featured on the menu. (yummy)

Thanks to the lessons started by Prince Henry our students are growing into quite the navigators.  We have learned about the Kingdoms of England and Spain, and traveled to Portugal to witness the beginning of the “Age of Exploration”.  We built astrolabes, and many students were able to locate the north star in the night sky and get an accurate reading of our latitude.  Hopefully you were able to see the other objects burning bright in the night sky…Mars and Saturn are particularly beautiful this time of year.  Students will be using their knowledge of navigation and exploration as we prepare for a class simulation at the beginning of second semester.  We have a lot of preparation to complete before we let these new sailors set sail.

We are looking forward to International Children’s Day, on October 29th, as we spend our day in the country of Spain.  Please visit the link to our classroom photos.  We have many fun experiences to share. 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HtDfUYD4SGyg6N1UEpza6FkAvdF7Espq?usp=sharing

Stay healthy and happy,

The E6 Teachers