We have a date for our watershed restoration project, Tuesday, Oct. 28. This is earlier than I had anticipated, but hopefully we'll be able to get enough drivers to make it work. We'll be going out to Point Reyes and possibly building willow walls and planting native plants. I don't have the specific schedule for the day yet, but we will spend the entire day at the site. S.T.R.A.W. (our amazing partners who make all this possible, through The Bay Institute) provides all the materials, including gloves, for the project, and the class provides the labor. The tasks are child appropriate, and we will work hard! We need drivers to get us to the site and 7 adults (drivers or others) to help supervise the student work groups. Any interested adults are more than welcome to join us for the day. Please let Marianne Hill (our field trip coordinator) know if you are able to help--those driver forms need to be completed as soon as possible! This will be a fun, exhausting, subtly educational day, and I can't wait!

We have moved into the Midwest this week--the Midwestern States-Part 1 test will be on Tuesday, Oct. 7, as will the next language test (which will include identifying prepositional phrases). Students have been learning about our Constitution since the beginning of the year ("We the People..."), and they have completed a study guide for the test they'll take on Wed., Oct. 8. The test on the second column of prepositions will be on Thursday, Oct. 9.

We have been focusing on algebraic expressions and equations in math, first in chapter 5, with an emphasis on addition properties and now in chapter 6, with an emphasis on multiplication properties. Our next chapter will be on graphing and data analysis.

The second geography test is coming home in this week's Friday folder, and it was an interesting test to grade. The grades ranged from perfect scores to not meeting standards--disappointing in that there were not more of the former and that there were any at all of the latter. Students need to study for these tests, using the geography packets we work on, discuss, and correct in class. We have talked extensively about latitude (parallels) and longitude (meridians), using maps, globes, and atlases to understand these basic locational concepts, and I was surprised to find that more than one student was unclear about these. If you have maps at home, or if you use a GPS unit, please take the time to help your child understand that the geography concepts we're working on in class are the same concepts that people use every day to help them find their way around or to understand our relationship, geographically, with other places throughout the world. Real life connections make learning more engaging and meaningful--students are benefitted when they understand that they don't spend all day at school learning things that are only for school but rather that they spend time learning things at school in order to understand the world around them. And on that note...Have a great weekend.