Last week in performing arts Green Ridge and Blue Bay kids were assigned their characters in the plays. Rose Hips kids chose jokes to perform. This week we introduced our songs to all of the kids and started singing them together.

Green Ridge and Blue Bay kids worked on character worksheets. They dove into their scripts and characters and determined some qualities of their characters, like do they move and talk fast or slow; what emotions do they have? They will keep these worksheets in the folder of their scripts and use them as they develop their characters in rehearsals.

All students have been invited to draw images for our promotional materials. There are directions for how to do this in their take home folders and they are also linked here. Drawings are due at school on Tuesday November 4th.

Here is a letter gives you the information that you’ll need to know to support your child in performing arts. This letter will also go out via email and parts of it will go home on paper. Please make sure you read the letter, as well as all of the attached links. And please contact Ms. Sharp if you have any questions or concerns!

Blue Bay had another yearbook class today where we finalized the pages we’ll have in our yearbook and started to explore how a theme will tie everything together. We also started working with our digital yearbook materials on the chromebooks.

TreeRing is running a sale for 10% off yearbook purchases through 10/31. 

In Humanities, Blue Bay students have written the first draft of their journalism articles, in hopes of getting published in the BBS fall newsletter. They edited one of their peer’s writing today and will start typing their final drafts tomorrow after some feedback from Mr. Sump. Ryan Dempsey from the Jefferson County Library District came to provide information about the Oregon Battle of the Books and get students excited! It looks like there will be at least two teams from BBS participating this year.

In Math, students completed a project in which they applied map and coordinate skills to make a cross-section diagram of Black Butte relative to Camp Sherman (photo below). They are continuing to work on re-establishing their foundational skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and starting to work with decimals. I have been emphasizing that being a student is their ‘full time job’, and they need to take their work time in class seriously and do their best. This is one of my strategies for helping motivate students to stay focused and work hard, so feel free to also use this lingo.

During Buddy Time, students did a fall forest bingo scavenger hunt with their partner in the national forest across the street. It was fun to watch them work together as they explored the fall forest amongst the beautiful yellow tamaracks.

In literacy we have continued work with digraphs and short vowel sounds. Students are bringing home work that includes heart words and/or books and sheets they can read to you. See what they have learned! 

In math we have been playing with balances to learn about weight and solid or 3D shapes. 

⇒ Games and activities to try at home

• Math: See if students can give you the math names for solid shapes around the house (cylinder, sphere, cone, rectangular prism, cube)
• Literacy: Spend some time looking through work students have brought home and see what they can read and explain. 

In science we are wrapping up our unit about the importance of school and how education is supported as a basic human right around the world. Students made personal crests about the importance of school and are recording why school is important to them in their scientific notebooks.

We have continued our geology studies this past week of Field Studies. Students have been working on creating a comic strip about a rock who travels through the rock cycle. It has been fun to see them get creative as they show their understanding of how rocks change over time. They are building their geology vocabulary as we explore terms like erosion, sediments, subduction, and metamorphic. We also spent time this week learning about how the Earth’s tectonic plates have moved over time. 

In P.E. class we have done quite a bit of trail running lately. The fall colors are spectacular around the school so we have been going out in the woods on our many local trails. Last Thursday we ran down to the river to watch the Kokanee spawning. The kids loved watching them and as the squirmed and wiggled up the river bed.