As the quarter comes to a close and your students are finishing their end of unit projects, we are finding many of the most popular items running low. The funny thing is the most popular things are items you might find at home laying in junk drawers (we all have them) or closets with no purpose! If you have any of the items on the list laying around the house your students would love to re-purpose them into golf courses, zip lines, rafts, bridges, and buildings! Any donation would be greatly appreciated!
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We are headed into our last few weeks of the quarter and your students are working extremely hard!
My 7th graders have been working with a new measurement instrument, a dial caliper, to find accurate and precise measurements. There has been a ton of excitement with using this new tool, so I created a lab, where they can work independently or in cooperative groups practicing their skills in using a ruler to sketch as well as measuring small items from our classroom! We just finished a project where your student's created an attraction for an apple orchard. They had to conceptualize it then plan it, sketch it and create a visual for their presentation. I was beyond excited and impressed by some of their ideas! Your 5th graders are wrapping up their studies on Zombies! As we are defeating our zombies your students have been discussing characteristics and traits needed for survival. We brought up the age old topic of Natural Selection and what plays into surviving. We even discussed mutation and how that affects our chance of survival! We finished the week up working on our Zombie stories! These students are so creative and cannot wait for me to read their stories! These will be due next Friday as we will begin our next adventure for the last three weeks of the quarter! For both grades it is my goal to have students complete a Passion Project, which will be called Genius Hour. This is based off of Googles 20Time, where 20% of employee's time is spent on deepening their understanding of a topic of their choice. This is where Gmail has come from as well as Post-It Notes from a similar program at 3M. The thought behind this is to engage students in researched based learning of their choice, which will in turn strengthen their questioning, research, and presentation skills for their content classes! I am so excited to start their Genius Adventure with them! I must also thank all of your for your support. When students ask to work on things at home, I only allow it because I can see how excited they are to show off their ideas and learning! If you ever have any questions please contact me! Thanks, Mrs. Cullotta This last week was a busy one for all of us and it was our half way point! Specials classes only run for quarter before switching, about every 9 weeks so we have a snapshot of time to get to know your student and allow them to explore a different side of learning!
This week my 5th graders took on an engineering challenge. The Zombies were approaching and we needed to create escape structures! Working in teams students created one of four options- a bridge, a collapsible ramp, a zip line, or a raft. Using their collaboration skills students unknowingly worked through the engineering design cycle imagining, planning, and creating their structures. Part of the lesson included testing out their structure and see how well it worked before the final test. Students did a test run with their structure and the whole class took "Grow and Glow" notes to offer suggestions and appreciation of each other's work. The following day students got to make adjustments to improve their structures, they got to experience that if things were not working too well, that they could get back up brush themselves off and keep on going! Friday we had our final test and It was amazing to see what your 5th graders engineered! We used REAL eggs as a model of a human, because humans are just an fragile as eggs, to see how well we might fare in their structures! I brought in 30 eggs assuming that we would have a quite a few casualties, however we only lost 4!! This upcoming week we will be reflecting on our building and putting our experiences into our creative writing pieces that we are close to finishing! The 7th graders were continuing in their unit of Sketching, finishing up by learning their final type of sketch. Thursday students could create any "something" they wanted to sketch and some of your students were going above and beyond with their creations. Once done we started on our final sketching project- creating an attraction for a fictitious apple orchard. Students are not only sketching, but practicing their documentation skills and working through the Engineering design cycle again! Next week we will do a very small build to create a model that represents their drawings. From there we will be working on our measurement skills and learning how to work with a new tool, a dial caliper! Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions! Mrs. Cullotta These last two weeks have been a blast! The students are hands deep in learning without even realizing that they are using their science and math skills!
In their quest to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, the 5th graders have been creating models of how disease spreads by playing Zombie Tag and Infection Tag. We threw in a version called Humans Fight Back too! Students would play rock paper scissors after being tagged and if the human won, modeling how their immune system could beat the virus! We have been working on our creative writing skills and making our own versions of a Zombie Apocalypses through Google Classroom (which was a feat in itself to get 30 5th graders logged on to!). Finally we ended the week by creating another model of how we might prepare for an emergency evacuation if the Zombies were approaching! We estimated how much we could carry, many of us thought 40-60 pounds was no big deal, but with the help of 8lbs gallons of water we quickly found that we over estimated our strength! To test how our bags would affect our pace, we had students walk the main stairs with and without the backpacks filled with the water jugs (16-24 pounds). When we got back to class we learned how to find an average and compared the three fifth grade classes! We will have our first assessment score in the grade book next week, as well as the first notebook grade- that they have been doing their part and documenting our work in class- just as engineers do! It has been a whirl wind! The 7th graders have been working just as hard, but with a medical science focus in mind! Last week I presented all four classes with a problem, they had to make a foot and ankle brace for a figurative patient with Cerebral Palsy given certain criteria. They were given 2 days to work in their teams and had to present their prototype on Wednesday! After seeing all of the cool ideas and designs we reflected on how well we worked as a team and created norms to follow to improve our collaboration skills! After deciding our norms we discussed the process they went through and how closely it reflected the Engineering Design Process. After reviewing the Engineering Design Process we jumped two feet into sketching! We have worked our way from simple Thumbnail sketches to Isometric sketching and they can't believe how cool it is to seamlessly draw three dimensional shapes! Grade have also been updated to reflect the first challenge as well as a small assessment! We have had little to no homework for both grades! If you ever have any questions please feel free to contact me through my website or email me at school! [email protected] Enjoy your weekend! Mrs. Cullotta This week has been amazing! It has only been three days, but I already know it is going to be an amazing year! I am beyond excited to jump in to curriculum on Monday! This quarter I have 5th and 7th graders. The 5th graders will be working on many different concepts and standards focused on Zombies! We will be looking at how disease spreads, building structures, and statistics and probability! The 7th graders will be focusing on engineering skills! We will be building, designing, sketching and measuring!
These last three days we have been team building and getting to know each other! We have played Sneak-a-Peek where students only get 10 seconds to sneak a peek at an object and need to work together to recreate it and have also set up our Engineering Notebooks. I will rarely assign homework but when I do it will be answering a simple question or bringing back information to continue our projects! Projects will only be worked on at school! I will ensure enough time for students to work on them in class so that parents don't have to worry about working on them at home. I am beyond excited to join the Big Hollow Family and can't wait to meet every student! Please feel free to contact me! Mrs. Cullotta These last few weeks have been very eye opening! Things in 6th grade, at NMSA, and in the district are changing and growing!
NWEA scores are in and many of your 6th graders did very well and showed how hard they worked over the last few months. Some 6th graders did not do so well. Please make sure you ask your student about their scores. A lot of what we do in class and the EPIC that they are put into is based on the those scores! This week we are looking at what those scores mean to us for the future; what colleges we could go to, what jobs we might be able to have. There has also been a lot of talk going on with the Learn Charter proposal. Learn Charter is trying to bring another charter school to North Chicago. This would mean a drain in resources and students, which in turn would quicken the pace of the closing of our already underfunded district. This is the smallest community in which Learn has opened schools, and yet they have over 14% of our students... There is a City Hall Meeting tonight and a Board Meeting at the High School THursday night at 6:30 where the decision will be made public. Please show up in numbers in support of D187 and against Learn Charter! Finally, we are starting a project in our math classes this week- we are planning the Valentine's Day dance for the school. This is a cummulative project and the students will be assessed on this. Because of the project there will be no homework this week, besides the weekly question. This week is an easy one! As always, please feel free to reach out to me! Thanks! Mrs. Cullotta Hello everyone!
This has been such an exciting year! Our second round of NWEA Map testing has ended and I am very proud of all of my students! We have come along way since the beginning of the year and I know we are all growing to SOAR like the Eagles we are through the end of the year! We will be starting our first project this week! I am so excited! We will be planning the NMSA Valentine's Day Dance in conjunction with the PTO. This will start Wednesday! I am hoping that we will get access to our Chromebooks and will be able to make our presentation on Google! I will be regularly posting homework along with a weekly question on my website, so that students have multiple points of access to the homework and participation with math online! Finally, I have a lot of students with missing assignments. The missing assignments are regularly updated and posted on the whiteboard so students are aware. These assignments can be made up before school, during lunch, or afterschool (by appointment). As we are in 6th grade I will not chasing students around to make these up, reminders will be given in class, but they are young adults who are responsible for their education! As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions! Mrs. Cullotta! Hello! Welcome to my page!
First off I must apologize for the late start this year! It has been an amazing start to the school year, my students are such hard workers! On top of my amazing students, I got married this fall! So starting the school year and getting married was a bit hectic, the chaos was has shown me how wonderful things can really be! On Monday we will be starting our third unit: Rational Numbers! I am so excited because this unit is very active and hands on, so your students will be getting up and moving! I will start posting homework on the homework page again as another way for students to get it! I also hope to utilize my page as a way to get to know your students better and use that knowledge to help make their experience at school as personal and relatable as I can! Please never hesitate to call or email me! Look forward to a great start to a new unit! Mrs. Cullotta This week has gone very smoothly. Usually coming back from spring break the students are excited about the warm weather and a bit wound, but they have been wonderful!
I must say my homeroom students have been wonderful during testing! This time there have not been major mishaps and tests have gone very well. I am sure your students are going to be sick of me as I have seen them all day for the past three days! =0] Next week everything will return to normal- and I cannot wait to get back to teaching! We will be starting our statistics unit and will be relating it to the world around us. I will be challenging my students each week to post something on my blog relating to what we are working on in class. This will be for extra credit (Homeworkopoly rolls), but would really love if you participated too! I am not sure if your students have told you but in the next 8 weeks we will have a few more tests that the kids really need to stay focused for. Here are important dates through the end of the year! 4/3 No School 4/13-4/17 AIMSWeb 4/24 Statistics Test 4/27-5/8 End of Year PARCC 5/4- 5/? MAPP Testing 5/? TBD Formulas and Graphs Test 6/1 Last Day of School As always please feel to contact me! Enjoy the long weekend! Miss Scherer |