24-25: Week 15 Classroom News

Hello Families,

Happy New Year! January marks the beginning of BBS Ski & Ride, and students are getting excited for the slopes. The next session of Art Club starts this month as well. And this week we welcome 5th graders Indy & Augie to our school! Even though the holidays are behind us, there is plenty going on.

You’ll see a new format below; click on the plus sign to expand each box and see news and updates on each class.

All School News

Important Dates & Reminders

Jan. 16: Parent Meeting for End of Year trip at 4:30pm (parents of 4th-8th graders)
Jan. 17: First day of Ski & Ride! Do you have all the gear you need for your student? Check the gear list in your Ski & Ride Handbook (pg. 6) and let us know if there’s anything you need. Please read Mr. Sharp’s email sent yesterday with updated policies!
Winter Storytime video is ready! View on Vimeo here. Thanks so much to volunteer Brian Schultz for making this video!
Jan. 22 Art Club begins: This winter session is musically focused for our K-2 students. Registration paperwork was sent home today. Please return by January 13th!
After school pick up: Due to decreased visibility with the two mobile units, please meet your student at the front door OR wait till the bus has departed and drive forward in your vehicle. Teachers and students will wait outside the front door until they see a parent.

Update from Ms. Steele

Administrators (5th-8th)

Hello Families,

It’s been great getting back into the classroom and a routine of learning. The Administrator class now has 11 students. Matthew, Maelynn, Augie and Indy have been a fun addition to our group.

In math, the 7th and 8th graders are working on linear equations. The 5th and 6th grade students are still tackling the distributive property. It seems like it really throws us out of balance when we see a dreaded variable. Yikes! What do we do with a letter in math?
We are starting to memorize the 36 Oregon counties, starting with the 8 that are in the center of the state. Everyone should be studying these first 8 counties as we will have a quiz on them on Friday. This website will come in handy when we start to learn more of the counties. https://www.geoguessr.com/vgp/3536
We are also working really hard on writing about Bettleheim and his thoughts on fairy tales. And we started an in class art project which should take a few weeks to complete.

Update from Ms. Kassie

K-1 Literacy & Math

Welcome back everyone! I hope the break was joyful and restful for all of you. Students came back yesterday ready to learn and excited to see each other.

In literacy Kinder students are working on new heart words (a, for, is) and reviewing the ones from before break (my, in, the) as well as reading, spelling and playing with sounds from the 12 focus letters we have been working on. 1st grade students are learning the trigraphs tch and dge as in catch and badge.

Kinders are doing a big review of all that we learned in math before winter break so we can move on to some bigger concepts. 1st grade students are working on knowing all doubles by heart and then using what they know about those to help them solve problems close to those numbers. So if 6+6=12 then 6+7=13

Work and Play to Try at Home

Kinder literacy- Have kinder students look for their heart words around them to see they can start reading all around them!
1st literacy- Have 1st grade students look for the trigraphs and digraphs we have learned in books they are reading at home.
1st math- Have 1st grade students work on their doubles facts at home and help them know them by heart.
Kinder math- Have kinder students keep working on telling stories about getting more and taking some away and seeing if they can write the matching number sentence (I had 5 stuffies and then I gave 2 away 5-2=3) Can they draw a picture too?

K-2 Social Science

We have finished our winter holidays around the world unit. I hope you enjoyed the lanterns students brought home! We are starting a sound and light unit where students will be understanding what light and sound is. Plus thinking about how they are used in the world around us.

Update from Mr. B

BeBop Literacy & Math (2nd-4th)

In the morning Bebop class, students are working on graphing temperature data via line graphs, writing numbers in expanded form, figuring out why a single grape costs $1.50 in Puzzleland (ask your student!) working with multiples of 4, 6, and 7, writing declarative and interrogative sentences in cursive, finding the vowel letter that spells the schwa sound in multisyllabic words and listening to a Daniel Manus Pinkwater story titled Blue Moose.

Art Literacy (4th-8th)

In Art Literacy, all students are working on a ‘foot’ and ‘hand’ self-portrait. See photos below!

Update from Mr. Sharp

Field Studies (4th-8th)

Welcome back and I hope everyone had a nice holiday season. We got back to a full building this week with construction in full swing and 28 students in our classrooms. BBS is full of life in the dead of winter.

In Field Study class we are starting a unit on electricity and coding. Students will move through a series of lessons this winter learning how to build circuits and program small electrical machines to do a wide variety of simple tasks. I expect this unit to challenge them but also tap into their creativity. They will be learning skills that many of us parents never learned or had to use at their age.

Health Class

In Health class we kicked off a program called the Kids Heart Challenge from the American Heart Association this week. We had a visit from one of their educators, Isabelle, who introduced the program and sent students home with a flyer. This program is completely optional and done at home but it should be a fun activity to do with your child this month. See my email yesterday for more information.