Weekly Post 12-22-16

This week in Team Spencer we have been gearing up for the break.  Over last week our government has been deciding how to be more socially active.  We have decided to volunteer our time with the Michigan Humane Society in any way they can use us.  We have also decided to create fundraisers so we can donate money to Equality Michigan, an organization that helps support equal rights in our state.  When we come back from break, look for an art sale to help support this charity.

We have been continuing to read a chapter of our favorite books to each other in order to provide good options for our next reading project.  Each student has been asked to read from their favorite book and then choose one of their classmate's recommendations to read for our next project.  If you are interested in our suggestions, visit our class' front porch.  We have put up all of our recommendations and why we would recommend them.

In Math we are working on learning our multiplication tables.  We have been trying to increase our accuracy and our speed when recalling our facts.  In the new year, we will be creating our music videos to help us remember our facts.

Weekly Post 12-9-16

What a crazy week on Team Spencer. We have been working hard to get ready for the school play.  We all made shadow puppets and have been working on our lines.  It will be a great show.  

In government, we have a new president.  Sean is our new president.  He has already chosen his new government and is working on new ways to make the classroom system more sustainable.  The goal is for the class not to need the teacher.  

We are working on a general outline for our Hero's journey stories so that we have all the elements of our prewriting complete.  Next week we will start writing our first chapter to our stories.  We continued to read the Odyssey and are beginning to understand how to summarize what we've read without adding too much extra details to our summaries.  

Every week in our class we will be reading a chapter from our favorite books to each other.  We will then have to choose a book that was recommended to us for our next reading project. If you want to know what books we recommend, there will be a display of them outside of Spencer's classroom.

In math, we are beginning our music video project.  We are watching multiplication music videos and playing games to memorize our multiplication tables.  We will then be either writing our own songs or remixing a song we have already heard and making our own multiplication music videos. 

Students modeling for their shadow puppets  

 Staging our play

Weekly Post 12-2-16

Hi Team,

We had a super fun week.  On Monday, we went to see Moana.  On of the main characters in the story is the demigod Maui.  We have studied Maui and written our portion of the school play about Maui.  We were able to see the similarities and differences between the Maui in the Movie and the one we have been studying.  We also were able to identify how the movie fit perfectly into the Hero's Journey narrative.

We also worked on inventing our own characters for our Hero's Journey story.

Tuesday we were invited to a special animal presentation.  We hung out with an opossum, a  skink, and even a kangaroo. 

This week was an election week for the Team Spencer President.  Everyone that wanted to run gave campaign speeches.  On Wednesday we held our first ever primary. Josiah and Mason won the primaries.  On Thursday they had a classroom debate where they discussed classroom issues. On Friday we had our election.  It was a close race.

In math we found all of the little mistakes we have mad and came up with ways to measure and fix our mistakes. We finally have finished drawers!

Grandfriends Day

This Grandfriends Day was super exciting!  We told our grandfriends all about our classroom and showed them how we do things.  We used the hero's journey to make up a crazy outer space hero story.  It was a fun day.

Weekly Post 11-18-16

We got a lot of work done on Team Spencer this week.  On Monday, Allyson Bettis, the Treasurer of Garden City, came to talk to us about the role of the treasurer in the treasurer in a government.  We played a cool money game and got some Garden City swag.  We took what we learned and started a tax system for our class government.  We will use the taxes to provide the kids with free paper markers and other supplies that they previously had to pay class money for.  We began reading the Odyssey and have started fitting what we read into the steps of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey theory.  We have also been writing our own Hero's Journey story.  In Math we have finished measuring and cutting all of the wood.  We are now using our measurements and the diagrams we made to put the drawers together.

Weekly Post 11-11-16

It has been a short and somber week on Team Spencer.  We passed a law in class government allowing students, who get paid $10 class dollars a week, to have 11 and 1/2 days of paid absent days.  They have such great ideas.  We also started to write our own stories using the Hero's journey.  On Friday we went on our annual Thanksgiving Day Parade warehouse tour.  We will be seeing how all the floats are made and learning about the history of the parade from Spencer's dad! A magical day.  In Math we started to measure out the actual wood we will be cutting based on the measurements we made last week.  We should have it all cut out by next week.

 Val as Aretha Franklin

Spenser in a paper mache head

 Measuring our wood