December 21, 2012

Merry Christmas everyone! The students have worked really hard this year, and I hope they all enjoy their well-deserved break. Above, you can see pictures from when visitors from the Nature Museum taught a lesson about air, and the students performing How To Eat Fried Worms. (They did a great job and read with a lot of emotion!)

I passed out the project sheets for our next book, The Whipping Boy, yesterday. We'll actually begin reading this book after break, but I wanted to share the projects with the students now so they could get started on them over break. If they are doing the castle project, here are some helpful websites:
Castles for Kids
Medieval Castles

December 14, 2012

I hope everyone had a great time at the Christmas concert! The students performed beautifully, and they had one of the toughest songs to sing, too.

We are finishing up our unit on weather. We have some special guests from the Nature Museum today, who are coming to teach a lesson about cold and warm fronts and high and low pressure areas. Next week, students will need to take their weather measurements on their own, and then create a weather report that they'll turn into a podcast to share with the school. The test will be on Friday. Yesterday, we discussed different ways to study for tests, and all of the students created a study plan.

Next week, students are going to begin taking their state quizzes. About two weeks of every month, they'll be given five-six states whose location they need to memorize. The study guide will be passed out on Monday, and the quiz will be on Friday. I've linked a game on the blog that can be a fun way to learn these. We're also going to begin reading The Whipping Boy next week, and I'll send home some information about the castle project that goes with it.  This won't be due until the middle/end of January (depending on how long it takes us to read the book), but it can be a good thing to work on over Christmas break.

December 6, 2012

Happy Advent! We are celebrating in the classroom by learning the stories of the Jesse Tree. So far, we've heard about the creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with many more still to come. We are also going to weekly prayer services with the whole school. We've been practicing for our Christmas concert as well, which will be this Sunday at 4:00. Please have your child there by 3:45 so we are all ready when it begins.



Last week in science, students conducted balloon races to learn about variables, data, and making predictions in science. This is one of the lesson ideas I learned from my classes with the Museum of Science and Industry. As you can tell from the pictures, they had a lot of fun!

In science, we are learning about the weather and taking measurements using instruments we made, such as a barometer, anemometer, and wind vane. We will have a test on this on December 20. We're finishing up reading How to Eat Fried Worms, and will be completing some projects for this book next week, such as creating new book covers and performing plays. Their sequence worms for the books will be due on Tuesday. I told the students that if they're really lucky, they'll get to eat some fried worms, too!

Before Thanksgiving, we were able to get together with our buddies to color some turkeys. Those pictures are below.