This week we kept working on group building and setting up activities, but we have introduced more than half of the academic subjects as well, so it was a very busy week. 

We completed our mission. We have agreed on the classroom we want to have, at least in the abstract. Our mission will affect what we choose to do and how we choose to do it. We have begun to propose and vote on legislation for the class government. This is a little bit confusing at the beginning, because we have to both agree on laws and how to pass laws at about the same time. Several students felt that it wasn’t a good use of time to be particular about the requirements for passing legislation, and this led to the passage of a law that many people disagreed with. So, the process for voting on laws has been tightened up.

We had Spanish three times this week, and it was a lot of fun. The class is learning classroom instructions and the names of classroom supplies first, and we are practicing some of them in our classroom as well. Senora taught them a hand game- Chocolate. It has been played during any and all free time this year. The girls taught it to me too.

We are five lessons into unit one in Math. Unit one relates to prime and composite numbers, factoring, divisibility rules and multiplication and division.Yesterday, everyone was playing a game called factor capture. It builds fluency in rapid factoring. Today we worked on divisibility rules, and many people are still working on applying multiple rules to one number.

Today, as part of our umbrella project on reflection, we did an introductory provocation. Everyone looked at themselves through a small hand mirror and drew the part of their face that they could see in the mirror. The student at left has the mirror below her, therefore the perspective you see in the drawing is accurate. This activity required that you draw, yourself, and so quite a few people found some aspect demanding. There was some intense focus, but also a lot of laughter.

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