Tuesday, March 16th: Reflection Sheet for Floor Plan Project, IXL, and Features/Traits Packet

We had our final day of building in math class, and most students glued every floor pannel and wall into place to create scale models of their floor plan out of cardboard and hot glue! Check out the pictures on this site's "Photos" page! The students have worked for three days on this project. They planned and revised their plans, calculated the area and lengths of all necessary building materials, as well as the cost of the different materials, and finally built their model home from the floor up. They should be very proud, and I'm looking forward to reading their Reflection Sheet tomorrow to see what they got out of it and how much they learned on the topic of area and perimeter. Their homework tonight is to complete the Reflection Sheet and to practice their skills on the assigned IXL list. Students who have been practicing every night should have moved through about 3/4 of the skills by tomorrow.

In science class, the students and I discussed the features and traits of mammals as a way to practice with these two terms. Since features are what help us put organisms into groups, and traits are what bring variety to these groups, these two terms will be important to understand as we begin a unit on natural and artificial selection, and the way traits are passed on to offspring generation after generation. Their homework tonight is to practice with these terms by filling in various diagrams in a packet we're calling Features & Traits.