Happy Holidays!

The Alchemists are ready for the holidays. They've finished lots of big projects, made and wrapped presents and then participated in the Seabury tradition of the Snowflake Breakfast. Pancakes, bacon, hot chocolate...yummy!

After breakfast the entire school gathers to sing Christmas carols. Traditionally, the sing a long ends with the 5th grade leading The 12 Days of Christmas with the proper hand motions.

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

Four Calling Birds

Five Gold Rings

Six Geese A Laying

The week ended with Pajama Day, a book exchange and holiday movies. Off to enjoy two weeks with family and friends!

ABC Books

For their November book reports the Alchemists read a nonfiction book then took what they learned and made it into an ABC book. Who better to share their books with but their Pre K and Kindergarten friends?

Winter Program

The Alchemists, along with the rest of the classes, have been writing scripts, learning songs and preparing for the Winter Program. Ms. Suzanne has been putting them through their paces during Performing Arts and "Home for the Wynters" is just about ready. The final step was making sets and the Alchemists prepared Sub Zero Sports.
The performance is December 8, 6:30 PM at the Knutzen Center.

Mentoring with the Pre K and K

The Alchemists mentor the younger students as the oldest students in the school. We spend time with them weekly doing activities in their classrooms and this week got to accompany them on a field trip for their study of transportation. The students rode the school bus to the Tacoma Dome where they caught the light rail and rode it downtown. Then they walked to a local doughnut shop for a treat, then off to the middle school for a quick visit then back on the light rail to the bus.
Everyone was exhausted but it sure is fun being big buddies!

Bake Sale for Haiti

After hearing about the destruction done to Haiti after hurricane Matthew the Alchemists wanted to help. They decided to have a bake sale and lemonade stand and invited the Seabury community to donate to the cause. After school store students, parents and teachers came to the bake sale and we ended up with $312 worth of donations. We will be sending a check to haitirefugees.org to help out.

Civics Are Us!

The Alchemists are becoming experts at how our country, state and city work. We have had amazing access to Tacoma city departments as well as learning about the upcoming election.
We continued our study this week by visiting with Councilman Connor McCarthy who told us about how the Tacoma City Council makes important decisions that affect the citizens of Tacoma. We met at the council chambers and even got to sit in the council members chairs.

After lunch at a Sundance, a Seabury fave, we hopped on the bus and got a tour of election central at the Pierce County Auditor's Office. We saw employees opening ballots and checking them, the machine that verifies signatures, boxes of ballots that have already arrived and the machines that will begin counting the election results on Nov. 8.

On November 8 the Alchemists will be running the lower school mock election where all of the students will vote for president, governor and senator.  On election night the Alchemists will be tracking the results of the presidential election with maps until someone reaches the magic 270 electoral votes.

Halloween!

You'd think the Alchemists would have just celebrated Halloween on Thursday but, noooo, we had a busy morning before we even got to partying.
We first visited Tacoma's Information Technology department where we were given lots of information about how the city uses technology from the  Director of Information Technology, Jack Kelanic, as well as a number of other department heads. We then went on a tour of the department and the Alchemists got to see servers, meet many members of the staff and ask lots of great questions. One Alchemist commented afterward, 'I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician but maybe now I want to work in technology.' We call that a successful field study.

 We then visited with Stacy, the director of the Tacoma farmer's markets, who told us how they organize the market, find vendors and handle the day to day running of the market. This information will be applied to a math project the Alchemist's are working on where they are designing a farmer's market.

After a very quick lunch, the Alchemist's hopped on the bus, came back to the LS and found the parents had put together a great Halloween party for them. A wonderful time was had by all!

The Galapagos Finches

The Alchemists are studying evolution and have begun looking at the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin first theorized that animals evolved by his observations of the finches on the Galapagos Islands. He noticed that even though the birds were isolated and non migratory they had developed numerous adaptations to find food on the islands.
The Alchemists measured the beak sizes of various finches then made models of the large and small beaks. Using their models they tried to "eat" large and small seeds to see which adaptation would be the most effective example of natural selection.