Everything in moderation

This afternoon, I showed the kiddos MyPlate and we talked about eating healthy and from all food groups and that if we chose to eat only one thing, our health may suffer because we aren't getting all of the nutrients our bodies need. Then, I read the book, Unplugged, about a "robot" named Blip that was always plugged in to her computer until there was a blackout and she became unplugged and happened upon outside. She really enjoyed her time outside and made new friends and learned new games. When she went back inside and plugged back in, she realized that it is good to sometimes be unplugged. This led us to discussing a balanced learning diet. We may want to read all the time but we need to balance our love our reading with other subjects. So, where does technology fit in? We said it is like the salt or sugar. It can add flavor to any of our dishes but again, if we add too much, it takes away the nutritional value. They didn't really like this idea but understood it. :)

We are really enjoying our new specials and in our morning meeting, we shared what we are most looking forward to in these new classes. Then, we played a strategy game called, "Aunt Minerva." It was frustrating at times but very fun and caused us all to think! Ask you child about it! In literacy, we read an article on Newsela about the California wildfires and then wrote a short summary about what we read. We also read, visited the library, completed our doodles and continued our research on our historical fiction topic/event. We related this summary of the non-fiction article to researching and how we need to read to understand and then write a summary of the information. Hopefully, this helps them to not copy word for word from their sources and to better understand what they are reading. 5th graders began to present their region research while 4th graders kept researching. Some of the prehistoric culture groups are difficult to find information on. In math, we worked with decimals and 5th grade worked with fractions. It's like we flipped flopped!