Learning To Go Mr. Avery's Class on the Web 

It must be spring! Last week, students across the school helped with the annual “turning the mulch” in preparation for the re-opening of our playground. Next Saturday, families are invited to help build flower beds using materials donated by Home Depot. There will be live music, community spirit, and more! Please come if you’re able, and sign up for a task if you can (I see our class will be well-represented–thank you!). For more details and sign up: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0848a9a92da13-community

With just 8 weeks to go, students will learn to use technology to communicate and evidence their thinking through the use of student learning blogs! They will learn to navigate online environments, including posting, commenting, and replying; to create, find, and upload media such as images and audio files; and to collaborate with peers through reading and writing. This week, we will learn what it means to be part of an online community and how safety rules of common sense apply there as well as in real life. Then we will learn what a digital footprint means and how to create a safe one, as well as how to stay safe online. A note on safety and privacy: Student blogs are created via Kidblog.org. They are only open to invited peers and teachers. Once up and running parents will be invited to view them as well with a private password. For more information, please visit their site. Lessons on privacy and more are taken from Common Sense Media.

Our final lessons on telling time will focus on calculating time before or after (elapsed time). Notice the example above. Students have previously learned to tell time to the hour and half-hour, and now they are being stretched to apply that to new situations requiring a deeper understanding of time. In case your child struggles with this during homework, encourage them to try it with a toy clock or this online clock with movable hands (visnos.com):

Students investigated liquids in containers of different sizes and shapes, eventually deducing that water takes the shape of the container it is in, and the level of a liquid stays parallel to the earth. This week we will investigate water on the earth. How much is there? What do we use it for? And how much of it is potable water, necessary to sustain human life? These are introductory lessons to a study of water conservation we will conduct as part of Floral Goes Green 2017. More to come on that!