Families, don't forget that the International Food and Fun Festival is tonight. Today, some students dressed in a way that shared their family heritage. Can you guess where these students might be from?
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Students are really enjoying the Marble Run project. Today we explored levers in detail and discussed several ways students might add a level to their runs. We will do the same exploration with each simple machine (pulleys, wheel/axle, wedge, screw, and inclined plain) next week. Thanks to parents for helping their child find some "junk" to help with these projects!
Last month we learned how to write informational texts. We did a paragraph with 3 to 5 details in it. And, they all had to be about the topic. We got to edit it and we wrote definitions for topic vocabulary words. We wrote informational texts about droids, video games, the Berlin Wall, and many other topics. (Anyla)
This month we are working on writing Opinion Essays. So far we have been brainstorming ideas of things we would like to change at home, at school, and in our community. Then we learned how to write an opinion statement and how to structure two reasons to support our opinion. Some opinions we are writing about are, needing a new pet, getting locks on all the bathroom doors, and taking care of CD's properly. (Ms. Stanesa) The class is going to make marble runs. The marble run has to have all six simple machines, all four types of motion, the marble has to slow down, stop, start again, and speed up. But, the twist is that we do not have a track. We have to make our own track out of junk. Before we make our runs we made plans for them to make we had all the requirements. About a week ago, the class did a video. It was about simple machines. We made pictures to go along with the words and the reading partners helped each other. The favorite part of the project was planning what to draw because it was challenging for some of us. This is Part 2 of Sign of the Beaver, a story retold by all of our class. To make this video, we read the chapters, then we decided what the main ideas were, and then we drew a picture of the main ideas from every chapter and wrote a summary about our pictures. The best part was drawing the picture because you get to draw something before you write about it. We have started our next PYP unit, Culture Clash. This unit is focused on Michigan History, the culture of the Native Americans that lived here and what happened when the Europeans and their culture entered the picture. The novel we are reading is The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Spear. As a way to think deeper about the story events and characters in the book, we are retelling the story with pictures and summary statements about them. Here is Part 1 - ENJOY! This week in science, a student was the teacher and showed the class how to make slime. She showed us what ingredients we needed to make it. She told us that we needed corn starch and soap, and she told us that you need to mix well with a spoon and get all the lumps out. She also told us that it can be any color soap you want. We learned if you add a lot of soap, the slime will get gooier. And, if you don't add as much soap, it will get harder. Whatever color the soap is - that will be the color of the slime. She is a great inquirer because she learned how to do this all on her own by searching for and watching a video on YouTube.
Last week we learned that the Earth's crust is broken into big pieces called tectonic plates. When they are pushed together they cause earthquakes and mountains to be formed like the Alps, Himalyans, Andes, Rockies, and Atlas Mountains. The Ring of Fire is a circle of active volcanoes that surround one of the tectonic plates.
We have been doing fun activities for word work. We have been learning parts of speech like nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. We do worksheets and fill out blanks to fix the sentence. We also do Spelling City, speed-sorting, Taboo, and word searches. We all have fun with doing all these fun activities. But, we really like Taboo because one person puts the word on their forehead and then asks questions to try and guess the word. That's really fun!
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AuthorThis blog is written by the students of room 201 and their teacher. Archives
September 2016
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