Sixth Grade News

What an incredible job today! The combined effort of the sixth graders added up to over 50 man hours of volunteer work for the Cheese Ranch Open Space. The students were shown how to identify and remove some of the most common invasive plants in Cheese Ranch and how they are effecting the area. Then the kids dug right in despite the cold. Their determination, hard work, and giving nature shone through their diligence and perseverance. Awesome work!

This week has been very productive! The students are continuing to learn about ecosystems and what factors can add balance or cause unbalance. Next week we will dig into how an invasive species unbalances an ecosystem. In reading, we have also been looking at character traits and how to use the actions, dialogue, and thinking of a character to determine a trait that fits them. We also have been working hard on finding the main idea in non-fiction and a quote from the text to support our thinking. The students are also learning the importance of citations to avoid plagiarism. They have then been applying this to their writing by summarizing a text and using quotes from the text to support their thinking. We are look forward to our upcoming field work in a couple of weeks and are working hard to build the background knowledge necessary for these outings.  Those permission slips will be headed your way soon!

What an incredible journey this week has been! Yesterday, we handed you back some tired, sore, but pretty joyful children.  You may or may not have been able to get much of the story of the adventure out of them yet so I thought I'd take a moment to offer some questions to ask your child about their journey. What activities did you participate in? Which one was your favorite and why? Which were the most challenging and why? What did you do when you go scared on the high ropes/zipline? What did you learn from these experiences? What was it like to be away from technology for 3 days? Did you make new friends or talk to someone unexpected? What did you learn from being out in nature? What did you learn about yourself on the hike? Thank you for trusting us with you precious little ones for 3 days. Having a chance to see them in this setting and watch them grow and spread their wings gave us such a new perspective that will positively impact the rest of our year as we cont