Red Ribbon Day Parade

Wow, what a day! We had a wonderful time parading around the neighborhood shouting our class slogan for Red Ribbon Day, "Show Good Character: Say No to Drugs!" Many of the kids came dressed as their favorite book characters. When you watch the video, make sure you keep an eye out for Horrible Harry, Clementine, Luna Lovegood, Alex Frankovitch, Katie Kazoo, and many more. And if you look really carefully at the cake our class enjoyed, you will see a really interesting character!

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Early Explorers Video

To review the concepts we learned in chapter 3, we created a short video highlighting the key words from our study. Several of the kids even created motions with their words. Enjoy!

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Turning Magnets On and Off

Did you know that a steel rivet can become a magnet? And then "turn off" as a magnet? It can! This week in class, science teams turned steel rivets into magnets. They created a complete circuit and then wrapped the wire around the steel rivet, making it become magnetized (it's called an electromagnet). Students could then use a switch on the circuit to turn the magnet on and off. Here's Mira's diagram showing the set up of the experiment...

Here are a few pictures of the scientists as work. You can see the rivet picking up the small washers.

Incredible Leads

In writing workshop, we are writing personal narratives. One strategy we have studied is how to write leads that "pull" your reader into your story. By studying leads from great picture books like Peter's Chair and Fireflies, we learned that strong leads include action, setting, dialogue, or a combination which creates a mood. Here are two different leads Virginia tried out in her writer's notebook.

I love how Virginia incorporated the strategies we studied in class! The dialogue and strong verbs put us right into the action. Kelkcee also utilized many of the strategies we learned in class with the lead she selected for her draft...

I love how Kelkcee uses dialogue. The line "My face was filled with fear," is one of my favorites.

Multiplication Stories

After reading the picture book, Each Orange Has Eight Slices, we decided to write our own math stories. We created scenarios similar to the ones we read in the book. Here are Betsy, Virginia, and Adam's stories...

Electricty Flows Through...

What can electricity flow through? That was the question we asked as we explored conductors and insulators. We built conductor/insulator-testers (which really looked like something out of Star Wars) and went around the room trying to find various conductors and insulators. Students hung their testers around their neck and with the help of a partner, attached the wires of a complete circuit to opposite ends of an object. If the motor on our tester ran, we knew electricity was flowing through the object. In the picture below, Naomi, Kandice, and Amy are testing out a the metal end of a pencil.

We were surprised by our findings. ALL metals are conductors (which not all metals are attracted to magnets...hmmm); while glass, porcelain, rubber, and plastic are all insulators. Here's a picture of Anna testing out George's necklace.

Shocked

Have you ever gone down a slide, stepped off, touched something else, and then experienced a great SHOCK? If so, you've experienced static electricity. In class, we learned how every object has negative and positive charges. Negative charges are always wanting to "jump" to positive charges, and when they do - you experience a shock! In this experiment, we have given a balloon a negative charge by rubbing it against wool. We then placed the balloon above a mound of salt. Here's what happened:

The salt jumped up and attached itself to the balloon - WOW! The kids and I were really amazed. It's static electricity in action!

Native American Tableaus

To review our new learning of Native Americans, teams of students created tableaus that showed the environment, food, resources, travel, religion, and culture of each region. We hope you enjoy!

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Electricity and Motors

On our second day of studying electricity, we learned how switches affect the flow of electricity in a circuit. As in our previous investigation, students were given a set of materials and asked to discover for themselves. I just asked, "How could you use this switch to make your motor turn on and off?" Using what they learned from our previous experiment, students were able to design a circuit that correctly utilized a switch. It was even more impressive when they were able to explain WHY the switch closed and opened the circuit. They had a great time experimenting and trying out new designs!

We also learned how to draw a schematic diagram. Here's Madison's Science Notebook entry:

Exploring Electricity

We had a great week beginning our study of electricity. I first asked our students to draw a diagram of how electricity flows from a battery to a light bulb. There were many different hypotheses among our kids. To test out our hypotheses, students were given two wires, a light bulb, and a battery. Their task was to make the light bulb come on. After several minutes, Adam and his table were able to light their bulb!

It took a little while, but every student was able to light their bulb. Several teams were able to find multiple ways for their bulbs to come on! Here is Elizabeth's drawing of the different ways we found to light the bulb...

We learned that electricity travels in a complete circuit, from one end of the battery to the other. If there is not a complete circuit (or circle), the electricity cannot flow through the receiver (in this case, the light bulb). Most of our students revised their original ideas, coming to a clear understanding of how electricity flows.