Franklin 9/15-9/16

Team Odyssey and Team Resilience took part in a "Poetry Dig" on Tuesday 9/15. They had the opportunity to rotate around several stations and explore the poems of different authors. Students were encouraged to record poets that sparked their interest. Many students were fascinated by Shel Silverstein's work. As we move forward in this ELA unit, students will be creating a biographical piece about an author of their choice. Using their research and inspiration, they will create a poem in a style reminiscent of their poet. Stay tuned for out poetry reading date where you can hear the original poems by these emerging artists.

Students in Team Enterprise have been working diligently on place value to the hundred millions (plus), how the values of digits in respective places compare to each other, and how powers of 10 and zero patterns play into these concepts. Today Mr. Pollard and I modeled a place value riddle game. Mr. Pollard had a number in mind (6 digits) and gave myself and the rest of the class clues to determine the different digits in the number. The objective was to use our place value knowledge and past knowledge to eliminate and select certain numbers.

After we had all participated in this activity (teachers modeled how to write and analyze clues) students were challenged to select their own number and create clues for that number based on place value and relationships between numbers.

First pic, Mr. Pollard's clues and classes observations about those clues. Second pic, Owen is sharing his clues with the class as Mr. Pollard types so students can review each clue. Third pic, Enterprise students working to decipher Owen's clues. What a great activity to synthesize skills used in lessons the past two weeks while challenging students to think flexibly and strive for accuracy.

This would be a great game to play at home if you're up for the challenge!

Team Enterprise is also embarking on a design and team challenge. They are working to design a class t-shirt. Today we reviewed our "need to know questions" (design questions, fabric, color, content, logo, etc).

We challenged students to look at definitions of "enterprise" and connect them to our classroom community, putting them in their own words. Every student shared their personal definition of Enterprise. We recorded all of those definitions in a Goolge Doc then entered those in a Word Cloud generator. We were able to see through this exercise which words occurred most often (based on size in word cloud). From here, students created an acrostic poem using the letters from Enterprise to further inspire their designs.

Next week we'll be video interviewing a designer to answer some of our ongoing questions regarding logo design and visual communication.

Have a great weekend everyone!

(Published 9/24)