Coding

Students have been using programs like code.org and Blockly to learn effective and efficient coding strategies. This week, teams got to put their learning into practice with "Dash".

Concept Maps- Changing Lands (Science)

Concept maps are instructional techniques for retaining knowledge. The are useful for language acquisition, comprehension, creative thinking and systems thinking. Here is a sample of some concept maps for our unit on "Changing Lands".

Students will be coming home with opinion published pieces next week! They are looking for family members to read their essays and give them positive feedback. This sheet will be attached to their published personal essays. Enjoy!

Todd Simcox Visits

Students have been reading nonfiction and are participating in research teams. Each team is responsible for reading, note taking, synthesizing and summarizing subtopics they assigned themselves on a natural disaster or extreme weather.

Students generated a list of question for meteorologist, Todd Simcox of WABI TV5. During his visit students listened to his answers to their questions, showed us pictures of the studio and tools he uses to forecast the weather.

Students are creating their own google slides to share their research learning and hard work.

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Social Studies- Tour of the Northeast

One stop on our tour of the Northeast was visiting the Hershey chocolate factory in Pennsylvania, one of the largest chocolate factories in the world. We learned that the NE region was a place where many factories started for two reasons: water power and there were plenty of people to work in them.

Students got to participate as factory workers as cutters, placers and wrappers of candy. They got to think about how they might feel if they had to do that job for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. We also shared positives and negatives about if a machine could do the work as a candy wrapper.

Hands on Science

Students are working like scientists and engineers! They are experimenting and collecting data on the function of a plant stem. We have celery soaking in food colored water. We will be observing changes to the celery this week. Mrs. O'Brien also shared her document camera with us so we could zoom in and see the stem of a geranium plant which may help us with evidence to support our claims about their function.

Students have been working on learning coding with Ms. S. (computer integration teacher). She challenged students to build a bridge to span 6 inches using only marshmallows and toothpicks. Teams were given a chance to plan their designs, 30 minutes to build and test their bridge, and completed the challenge with seeing how many pennies their bridge could hold. One team was able to build a bridge that held over 50 pennies!

First Writing Celebration A Success!!

Students shared their personal narrative stories on Monday, Oct. 1st in true camping fashion. Students created handmade campfires to read their stories by while eating a modified version of "s'mores." Lights were out and campfires "glowed." Students wrote about topics such as football games, camping trips, going to the fair, getting a new pet, spending the night at a friend's house, last year's infamous October wind storm, and much, much more! Our next unit of study will continue with the narrative genre, but will focus on Realistic Fiction writing.