Home Sick

Hey there class. I'm still home sick... hoping to make it for Friday! In the meantime, I hope you're taking good care of all of our plants in the room! Make sure all of our seedlings (science ones, secret ones, my garden ones) are getting plenty of water! Don't worry... sick or not, I will come in often over break to make sure they get water!

Wacky Wednesday!

Ughhhh... home sick again!!!

I'm very sorry that True Colors had to be cancelled today. We will definitely make it up later! Therefore, besides spelling,

you have no homework tonight!

Please don't forget that this Wednesday is WACKY WEDNESDAY! You can wear a wacky outfit: colorful, mismatched, crazy! Just remember to keep it appropriate and no masks or hats are allowed. At 1:15 on Wednesday we'll be having a wacky dance party with our kindergarten buddies, who are studying letter W this week!!!

Blog Response

Now that we've finished Sign of the Beaver, let's evaluate it.

1) On a scale of 1-10 (1 lowest and 10 highest), how much did you like the book?

2) Why or why not?

3) Would you like to read more books in that genre (the type of book: adventure)?

Following Directions

Today I felt like my students needed a little "Following Directions" pop-quiz. Here was the quiz:

Fun Pop Quiz!

Directions:

This is a quiz to see how well you follow directions. Do only number 25.

1) Tear off the blank piece of paper stapled to this quiz.

2) In the upper right-hand corner of the blank paper, write your name.

3) In the bottom right-hand corner, write the name of a person sitting near you.

4) In the center of the page, draw three stars.

5) Below the stars, draw a box.

6) Write the number of siblings you have to the right of the box.

7) At this point, quack like a duck, out loud!

8) Turn the paper you’ve been writing on upside down.

9) Write out today’s date in the upper left-hand corner.

10) Shout out your home address.

11) Under today’s date, write what 6 x 5 is.

12) Under 6 x 5, write what 4 x 7 is.

13) Under 4 x 7, write what 3 X 8 is.

14) Under 3 x 8, write what 12 / 4 is.

15) If you think you got all four of these math questions correct, shout out loud “I am a mathematical genius!”

16) In the bottom left-hand corner, draw a smiley face. J

17) In the center of the page, say “woooooooooooooooo!” as you draw a swirl.

18) In the bottom right-hand corner, write numbers one, two, three, four, and five.

19) Stand up and reach for the sky!

20) In the top right-hand corner, write letter K backwards.

21) Stand on one foot and say the alphabet skipping letter D. If you mess up, start over!

22) Sit back down and fold your paper in half lengthwise (the long way).

23) Fold it in half the other way.

24) Write your middle name on a blank spot on the outside.

25) Ignore directions one through twenty-four and enjoy watching everyone else do this activity wrong.

Well, here is a video of the students taking the quiz:

And here's the reaction of a couple students when they got to number 25 on the quiz... (while others in the background are still working on it!)

Afterwards we discussed how I was given this quiz when I was in 6th grade at it is something I will never forget, and I wanted to share this fun way to remember to always read the directions!!!

Thankful

What a wonderful day I had today! Thank you everyone for making it so special. We had a fun time... Ms Jones brought in an ice cream cake for me, and I made brownies so we had the best snack ever today! Then we had fun during science putting seeds into our class sprouter and watering it for the first time.

After lunch, the students surprised me (and made me cry) by playing and singing "Happy Birthday" to me!

Then after some reading, we went outside on this BEAUTIFUL day and played soccer together!

And finally, it was requested that I ended the day with some arm-wrestling. (Sorry Sam.)

Therefore, I feel very thankful today to have such a fun, special class, and I'm also thankful for my family who brought me up to the person I am today (thanks for the flowers Mommy and Caitsy!) and my awesome, thoughtful friends.

Life!

We are growing many things on our classroom windowsill! Today the students made their own mini-sprouters and are going to see if they can sprout corn seeds, bean seeds, pea seeds, and sunflower seeds without soil!

Later some students and our kindergarten buddies helped me start planting my herbs and vegetables I plan to transplant into my garden this summer!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I know that not everyone celebrates it, but I wanted to show you how Koda celebrates St. Patrick's Day.

Fruit Dissection!

Today we dissected apples, green peppers, peaches, and tomatoes to launch our "Structures of Life" science unit. We separated the seed from the fruit and counted how many seeds were in each fruit. We described the properties (size, shape, color, texture, smell) of each seed, and discussed why fruits have seeds. Also, even though in everyday language we might describe peppers, squash, and tomatoes as "vegetables," in scientific terms they are fruits because they are the parts of a plant that contain seeds. Vegetable just means "edible vegetation" and the fruits of many plants are edible!

Afterwards, we got to eat the fruits! Any scraps we had left over we fed to our hungry red wigglers in our classroom vermacomposting system.

Blog Response

Class, leave a comment about the following 2 questions:

1) Which part of Daily 5 do you like best, and why?

2) What do you think YOU will be working on during Daily 5?

Comprehension= understanding what you read

Accuracy= reading the words right

Fluency= reading smoothly, with expression

Expanding Vocabulary= learning and using new words

Finger Lakes Fresh

Can you really grow plants without soil? We're going to find out for ourselves in our science unit soon!

This past Thursday after school I had the privilege of touring Finger Lakes Fresh, a hydroponics greenhouse located right on Route 13 across from NYSEG. It was really cool to see how they grew their lettuce! In the greenhouse, computer-sensored lights and fans control the light and temperature to create a year-round growing season (as you can see in the picture below, it's snowy outside but beautiful, healthy lettuce is growing inside!)

They place the seeds in rockwool,

and then once the seeds germinate

and the plant grows big enough, they cut up the pieces into squares and place them onto floating platforms. The roots soak up the pool of water underneath

and within one month (twice as fast as growing it in uncontrolled conditions like your garden outside) the beautiful leaves are ready to harvest!

They sell their lettuces to Wegmans (both here and Syracuse!), Tops, Price Chopper, Greenstar, and Ludgate Farms. In addition, Cornell University, Ithaca College, Cayuga Medical Center, Moosewood Restaurant, and The Heights Cafe and Grill buy the lettuce for serving. I've had this lettuce before and it is the best salad I've ever had! I highly recommend it!

Olympic Gold Medalist Visits Caroline Elementary!

An alumna (which means that she went here) of Caroline Elementary, Olympic gold medalist in rowing Caryn Davies came to our school today to promote the World Fit Program! It will launch in Caroline after our April break. Your goal is to exercise 3 miles a day! Here are some clips from her visit:

Class Picture!

Nice picture:



SILLY PICTURE!

An Exciting Week

Wow we've been doing so many cool things this week that I couldn't keep up posting them!

Reading
In Daily 5 we've been learning reading strategies that will help us with our comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary.


Math
In unit 7 we are working with fractions. The pattern blocks shown below help us to visualize fractions of a whole, but during her free time Talia makes a beautiful pattern/design with them!

Also, today we spent time cutting out fraction cards.


Science

In science this week we began our Structures of Life unit by discussing plant growth. We planted our own plants, and watched a powerpoint on vegetables. Students impressed me with how much they knew about vegetables!

Reading Buddies
On Wednesday our kindergarten reading buddies came to our room! We always love reading to them and helping them learn to read!

The Fraction Song!

Writing Magic

I wrote a grant to bring David Moreland, an educational magician, to our school to do his "Writing Magic" presentation. We were all blown away by his tricks!

Here he is with a magic whiteboard. The picture he drew came to life!

And then, our very own Josh helped him to turn a single white handkerchief placed into an empty bag into a long strand of colors!

But in addition to the tricks, David taught us three important lessons about writing a story.

1) Does your story have a beginning, middle, and end?

2) How can I show instead of tell?

3) Where can I add more variety?

Circuits

Today we had a breakthrough in our learning about circuits.

When we had one D-Cell and one light bulb in our circuit, the bulb lights fairly brightly:
But if we add another light bulb with our one D-Cell, each bulb lights more dimly:

Our challenge was to see if we could arrange the components in our circuit to make the light bulbs light as brightly as they had with just one bulb in the circuit. After a few hints, students came up with some ideas!




In the end, we discovered the difference between a series circuit:



and a parallel circuit: