Resources, Fishing Frenzy, and More! Monday Update April 11

Hello everyone!

Hopefully you had a great weekend and enjoyed the sun! Some key items from today:

  • Our next Lit Circle meeting is tomorrow
  • Please finish your resource reading for tomorrow
  • Supplies for your scale model should come in on Wednesday
  • Library tomorrow, so bring your books!
  • Class meeting today was about end of year activities, and we are looking at an electronics day, water park visit, and a water fight…..more discussion about these plans next week.
  • Abel Test practice in Ms Branco’s room and Gauss Test in Ms. Juma’s at 8:15 tomorrow. At this time, all students are signed up for the tests they will take on May 11 and there can’t be more changes due to ordering of books.

We continued our talk about needs and wants today by looking at psychology research done by Maslow, who developed a “hierarchy of needs.” Beyond our survival needs, the physiological needs, what else gives us the motivation to do things? What makes us light up inside? What makes us want to get up each day? Is it belonging? Is it power? Is it about self esteem and achievement? We had a discussion and reflected on our personal motivations. How do we get our needs met beyond the basic survival ones? Do we choose negative or positive ways to get these needs met? Please talk about this more at home.

Fishing Frenzy!! We played a group game designed to simulate the problems with over fishing as we seek food resources from the world’s oceans. Students were asked in class to reflect on the experience. Our fishing resource experts reported on the fishing methods currently used and the pros and cons of each.

Fair Resources: To represent how the world has inequity in its resources, we did another quick simulation to show, if the world were only 24 people, how many would be the wealthy, the middle class, the poor, and the poorest. Ms. D read some statistics for each group so we could understand the distribution of wealth and resources out there.

Art for the Musical! For art, we made large 3D flowers out of paper that will serve as part of the set for the school musical in May. We have a lot of flowers to make, so it will be one of our ongoing projects.

This week, more on world resources, systems of government, budgets and saving money, and an intro to rocks and minerals!