We have enjoyed some amazing fall weather at BBS this past week. Our west side hike combined warm sunshine, beautiful fall colors, and a fun exploration of a temperate rain forest. On Monday I got to take all the students down to the river to watch the kokanee swimming up to their spawning grounds. We are doing our best to take advantage of the season and spend time outside connecting to our natural world. 

One new initiative this year is a new Health/SEL curriculum called Wayfinder. Rachel and I have begun going to each classroom weekly to teach short lessons from this curriculum. Our focus in October is community and belonging. So far the students have enjoyed the lessons which often involve a fun activity to get the kids talking and moving. Ask your child what they think of Wayfinder so far. 

I have also found some time to connect with other school leaders this fall. I spent part of a morning last week touring Sisters Elementary School with Mrs. Storey, their principal. Then this week I got to return the favor as Mrs. Storey and assistant principal Mrs. Giles came and visited BBS for a morning. We had a lot to discuss and it was fun to see their beautiful new school and show them what we have created at BBS. Strengthening our partnership with Sisters schools has been one of my professional goals in recent years.

This coming week I will get another great learning experience while I attend Wide Open Spaces for a couple days (I am gone 10/12 and 10/13). This is a conference of small rural school leaders from across the state and has become one of my best professional networks in recent years. Despite some major challenges in our broader education system it is always inspiring to chat with folks from other schools and hear the dedication and commitment so many have to creating amazing schools for our current generation of students.

Blue Bay students started the week by completing their i-ready district assessments in reading and math. In math, our review unit is officially over and the students are off the races on their grade-level curriculum in Zearn. 5th graders are starting with place-value/decimal work, and 6th graders are working on the area of triangles and parallelograms, and finding the surface area of 3 dimensional prisms.

In Humanities, upper grade students are focused on the origins of Christianity, a religion that truly changed the course of world history. This week’s vocabulary words are related to this topic – ask your child to see their vocabulary list #5 and quiz them on the spelling tonight before their test tomorrow. Students have been practicing using apostrophes when writing contractions, and should be continuing to read about one chapter per school night in Scat by Carl Hiaasen.

In Science, the focus has been on how every organism has a niche, or role in the ecosystem. Students are working on The Ecosystem Job Fair Project to explore this idea, and each student has their own animal species as a topic for their project. The students are still in the research phase.

Next week, it would be great if you could help them put together their poster at home, and be an audience for them to practice giving their presentation. They will be doing 1-2 minute presentations to the younger students at school next Thursday and will be able to take their poster supplies home starting on Tuesday. They also have an assignment sheet that has the details on the poster requirements.

 Literacy

• Meeting more sound animals, doing computer assessments, reviewing trigraphs
• Ask why we had 2 sound animals today.

 Math

• Working on writing numbers 0-10, and reviewing Empress Ella Equals
• Ask about Ella Equals.

Science

• How do we add detail to observations? 
• Ask about fiction vs nonfiction books. 

Green Ridge Autumnal Awe

Literacy: Students are reading and writing two types of cinquain poetry (word count vs. syllable count), other vowel phoneme practice, generating entries in their writer’s notebook, and using structure words to write a story in their visualizing & verbalizing booklet. 

Math: Green Ridgers are continuing to apply order and grouping techniques as they begin to multiply with multiples of 10. Today, students began an activity matching the product to a variety of multiplication expressions.

Science/Social Studies: Students are wrapping up the September Harvest of the Month focus on hazelnuts. Ask your student about the varieties and which ones they’d recommend planting and why!

We’ve also taken part in several virtual field trips. Today, we visited the OSU Dairy Processing Plant. It was ‘udderly’ amazing!

Books we’re reading: Go Tell It – How James Baldwin Became a Writer, Sad Underwear and other Complications (poems for children and parents) and Bunnicula (a rabbit-tale of mystery!)