Jefferson 1/30-1/31

Congratulations to our Jefferson students, Abby and Willa, who participated in the WAWM District Spelling Bee on 1/30! They were competing against 28 students total in grades 4-8 and did an incredible job.

Abby is our District Champion! Way to go! She will advance to our Regional Bee on February 18th in Pewaukee. From there, the winner advances to Madison for the WI State Bee in March. We're all rooting for her here at Jefferson!

On Friday morning I was able to visit Team Achieve's Westward Expansion museum with Ms. Semrad's class. Students worked in small groups to create an exhibit in order to share their learning about a subtopic from Westward Expansion. I saw a dramatic re-enactment that taught viewers about the transcontinental railroad, a display and follow up quiz about the Alamo, a model of a Morse Code keyer, with a poster of the alphabet in Morse Code, an Oregon Trail poster with a quiz that tells you how you'd survive based on your answers, and a dramatic skit of the what involved with mail before the establishment of the Pony Express Pony Express.

Students were enthusiastic, clearly knowledgable about their topics, and were taking their roles very seriously! Thanks for inviting us to learn about Westward Expansion Team Achieve!

Scroll through the slideshow to see pics below

My 4th Grade Guided math group in Ms. Semrad's class began working on Order of Operations today. We started by having everyone solve the problem 2 + 4 x 3. All students came up with one of two different answers. 14 or 18. We talked about how we need to use the order of operations when aproaching expressions with multiple operations. To remember this I introduced the acronym, PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction). We talked about operation pairs M/D and A/S and that when those are the only operations left we work left to right.

Students then had a chance to apply this new learning to a practice set. They approached this new challenging task with a positive attitude and will continue working on this next week.

Chess Club members are really developing their skills. Students who started our season not knowing how to play chess have improved immensely! Players who came in with some skills are developing strategy in opening and check mating. Players will continue to develop their game until after April 16-17 when we'll hold our school tournament. Each elementary school will send finalists to the district tournament on May 22nd.

Team Achieve's 5th Grade Math group is starting a new PBL unit, "Magnificent Meals". Pairs are being asked to plan a healthy meal that can feed 10 for under 30.00. They will be utilizing decimal operations, fraction multiplication and division, finding and adjusting recipes, creating a grocery list within budget, finding cost per person, and pitching their meal to the group. The meal voted upon will be cooked and served by me.

In pictures below students are generating "Need to Know Questions" for the project. These could be logistical, academic, expectation-based. We then generated a list as a whole group. This will help guide the steps we take to complete this project. We decided our first step based on the list is to establish guidlelines about what healthy means to our group. We brainstormed strategies we could use to create these guidelines (make a list, Google Forms survey, interview an expert-chef, doctor, dietician), or do field work at a grocery story and research nutrition. We'll decide as a group next week how we will establish our healthy guidelines.

Have a great weekend everyone!