Weekly Post 1-13-17

What a week in Team Spencer!  It is election week again.  This time we had 4 candidates and our primary narrowed it down to 2.  Noelle and Josiah are battling it out for the presidency.  For this election, we are focusing on issues in the community that you would like to champion.  Noelle want to thank our community's first responders for their heroism and bravery.  Josiah wants to fight for the rights of marginalized peoples.  It will be a tough call.  

Also in government, there was a big debate on tax reform.  When the new term starts, the class will no longer be receiving their government allowance.  This means that in order to afford their bills, the class will have to get a job, or make a business.  Our poorer classmates worried about being able to make ends meet with the weekly taxes and proposed that taxes be higher for the richer than the poorer, but the richer classmates rebelled.  There was a huge discussion about how the government runs taxes and how our class differs from the United States.  We will make a decision during the new administration.

In language arts we have two projects coming up that are due before mid-winter break.  We are working on reading and summarizing stories. Every week we are to summarize what we have read from that week in three sentences. No more, no less. The other project is our writing project. We have done all the prewriting and outlining for our hero's journey story. We are now in the middle of writing it. The hard part of both of these projects is time management. We now have an end date, and we are given work time in class. The students can choose to either work on their writing, their morning work, or any business that they have set up for government. They must use their time wisely and make sure that they are giving each assignment enough time. I am checking in with them every day to make sure that they are making progress on all of their projects, and making sure that they are accurate and correct in their work.

In math we have been challenging ourselves on our times tables. We have works on everything from 1 to 5 so far. We are also working on our music videos and putting are math facts to music. Many of us have worked on linking the idea of our five times tables to the time on the clock. We played some pretty intense games trying to read an analog clock.