Friday, December 16, 2011

News Interviews

Science Lab

Does heat effect the rate of evaporation?

Two friends conducting a science experiment. Do all liquids evaporate at the same rate?





Our Amazing Week!

Our Amazing Week!

Check out our Animoto video!

Week of December 12

This week we started a new unit in P.E., hockey.
I liked helping our K-buddies with math, says Emma.
I enjoyed our science labs with matter, says Ceilidh. One of our labs was the "Ice Cube Investigation!" The testable question was, "do ice cubes melt at the same rate all of the time?" Our result was no because temperature, location and time are variables that make a difference.
We also danced to Feliz Navidad in Spanish.
I enjoyed learning the traditional algorithm to solve addition equations, says Aaron.
In art we worked on zoomed in animal pictures. In music we sang 4 more holiday songs.
Using a strategy called "Monitor for meaning" is helpful because we used some fun articles to try out using it. We are working on marking up the text to show our reading thinking.
In math we played close to 1,000 and we are working on using our mental math strategies to get close or on 1,000. One of the strategies is to make the hundreds and tens place value equal 9 and the ones equal 10.
We played a few games Mrs. Randall made on the Smartboard to review our math knowledge. In the horse game, we had 30 seconds to answer a math question. The firecracker would go "boom" if we waited the full time. We thought it was extremely fun and exciting.
We watched some science clips on you tube. One was about walking on corn starch and not sinking! We had a fun, amazing week!

Have a nice weekend,
Lily and Ceilidh!!

* K-Buddies- We are having a blast with our buddy class! They taught us about patterns this week and next week we’ll teach them about how to be a scientist! Shhhh…we’re making rock candy! Our class has been studying states of matter and this is a fun way to show how a liquid becomes a solid. (we copied and pasted this from Mrs. Randall's newsletter!)




Friday, December 9, 2011

Hanukah




If




you are Jewish, you might have heard of these celebrations. My Grammie and my mom came in and brought in two things Dreidel and sufganiyot. The Sufganiyot was for eating and the dreidels were for playing with.








This is my group playing dreidle! The coins in the middle is like a pot. The coins that the people have, are like ingredients. The people don't want the recipe to be made so they try to keep the coins.


This is my Grammie making the donuts. They were yummy! Below is the recipe











Sufganeyot

1/2 C Milk
1/2 C Sour Cream
1/2 C Cottage Cheese
6 T Sugar
3 Eggs
2 1/2 C Flour
1/2 t Baking Soda
1 t Vanilla
1 t Cinnamon

Combine all ingredients. Batter will be thick. Drop by spoonful into hot oil. Fry until golden brown. Remove from oil onto paper towel. Roll in powdered sugar and eat hot. It makes 3 1/2 dozen
Cha sameach (that means Happy Hanukah)!
Aaron


Untitled Project

December Project

Week of December 5

Science lab example

Friday, December 2, 2011

Week of November 28

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We had a awesome week!Here are some things we did over the week:

  • played 4 corners
  • talked about acute, angles, degrees, and used protractors
  • Started Our Guided Reading Book, "Fourth Grade Rats" by Jerry Spinelli and discussed it. We used the fishbowl protocol to watch/listen to what a book discussion might look/sound like.
  • read the book "The Little Read Pen" Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel
  • Got our Report Cards
  • Did Geography challenge worksheet
  • Played a game where you see all of our faces flashing. We call it "Flash Face"
  • Our School Wide celebration is having a Respect Tree that is in the cafeteria
  • Hung up the light for the Holidays
  • Played with Geoboards to make polygons and found the area or amount of square units
  • Got our Weekly Readers and found out that there is going to be a lunar eclipse on December 10, 2011
  • Started our Matter unit and talked about the 3 properties of Matter
  • Developed Questions to figure out if it is Matter or not; then criteria on if it is a solid liquid or gas
  • Had ELF on Prey and Predator and learned a lot about animal adaptations. For example, the skunk has a sack inside it's body that holds the stinky stuff that he/she sprays to defend itself.
  • Took a Multiplication assessment with 30 questions in 3 minutes
  • Made geometry patterns with stickers and hung them up in the hall
  • Finished our read-aloud book School of Fear by Gitty Danshvari and started our new book by Kat Falls called Dark Life.
  • We rearranged our desks for the month of December. We have four groups of 3 and one group of 2.
  • We had a science debate about what the properties of plasma are and if fire is plasma.
  • We wrote from a book jacket prompt-The Quiet Book. There were many different versions from what we all wrote!
  • Mrs. Randall taught us how to work backwards for POD. We created a timeline and worked backwards or a flowchart and used the opposite mathematical operation to solve.
  • Ms. Minor, our student teacher, taught us a math lesson where we created one-thousand booklets.
  • We earned 299 pawsitives this week! Mrs. Randall was surprised and very proud of our behavior! We exceeded our goal of 257! We will plan our celebration later today.
We had the best week so far!
Abby and Bella

Friday, November 18, 2011

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  • On Monday the book fair started. We were all very excited to see what there was!
  • We Skyped for our project "Where in Vermont are you?" and found out that Ms. Graf's sister was the teacher!
  • We measured the length of our classroom. After, we looked at the school blueprints to see how close we were! The dimensions were 25 feet by 32 feet. Some of us were only off by an inch!
  • We are learning about geometry like polygons, quadrilaterals, and other shapes.
  • We had our weekly multiplication test. We are improving quickly! There were only 4 people that needed to take the test!
  • We have been working on our VT glogs! We are all finished with them and will be posting them on our class web site soon. Our buddy class in Illinois is very excited to see them!
  • We are working on another math movie about measurement that we will be posting when we return from vacation.
  • We celebrated 3 birthdays this week too! Lots of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and cookies helped put smiles on our faces! Happy birthday to Cooper, Aaron and Mia!
  • We played VT hopscotch with our VT riddles instead of numbers! It was a lot of fun!
  • We made a surprise visit to our k-buddies to give them Thanksgiving placemats that we made ourselves. They were surprised and happy!
  • We Skyped a lot this week! We've found schools in Washington, Rutland, Bennington, Lamoille, and Addison counties. Today we Skyped twice!
  • Our Weekly Reader this week was about three women that won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think it is really cool that three women from other countries won this prize!
  • We have done a lot of writing this week! One fun piece that we are working on is from a video prompt that Mrs. Randall showed us from NASA about the astronaut patches. We each created our own badge that could be used in the future.
We had a PAWS celebration on Wednesday! We chose characters from our favorite books to be! We had a lot of characters from our read aloud book-School of Fear. Mrs. Randall was Mrs. Wellington for a day (good thing she wasn't dead like Mrs. Wellington)!

We had a fun week that went by quickly!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tyler and Emma

Friday, November 11, 2011

Week of November 7

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This week we...
  • In our social studies assessment, we wrote about how a county is affected by a specific physical feature. For example, the Winooski River has an affect on the town of Richmond because it helps keeps the soil moist. A downfall is that it can easily flood the area and have a negative effect on the town.
  • Making Mathematickles is fun! They are words in equations that link to the theme of "fall". I liked adding the illustrations. Our bulletin board looks good!
  • Our Glogs are looking good! They are posters we are creating on-line. We each have our own account and are adding information we've learned about the county we chose. It's fun to use all the different tools!
  • We helped our K-Buddies with their senses assessment. We brought them on a 4 senses (not taste) walk on our walking path. They noticed a lot of little details about touch, sound, sight and smell. We heard/saw tennis players playing on the courts.
  • A fun and challenging assessment in math this week was, measuring the length of our classroom. I used measuring tape and used feet and inches.
  • We had many authors share their work this week at Author's Chair! We had topics on everything from "In November..." (a writing prompt after Mrs. Randall read us a book called In November by Cynthia Rylant) to fiction stories.
  • We continued to use the strategy "Use or look for a pattern" in our POD. One of the problems was, "The Monsters of Muzz opened on Monday. The first day there were 25 people who saw the movie. Word got out and on the second day 42 people came, 17 more than on the first day. At the end of the second day 67 people had seen the movie. On the third day 59 people came, 17 more than on the second day. If each day 17 more people saw the movie than the day before, on what day would 500 people have seen the movie?" **Challenge-post a comment on this page and let us know if you could solve this problem!
  • We have begun our project "Where in Vermont are you?" We are skyping different classrooms around Vermont and trying to figure out their county, town and school name. We have developed specific questions and are using GoogleEarth to narrow down. Some of our jobs are Question Command Center, Tech Crew, Messengers, etc. This week we found a classroom in Addison county. This is much easier than our first project-Where in the U.S. are you? :)
  • Using yard sticks/foot long tiles in the hallway, we measured 100 feet. Did you know that 100 feet begins at the recess door and extends through the first door on the opposite side of the fourth grade hallway?
  • We found many body benchmarks for measuring. One of the most useful is our handspan! We had a variety (from pinkie finger to thumb) of lengths from 7.5" to 6". We measured four different objects with our hands.
  • We read a book called How Many Days To America by Eve Bunting and discussed the book's theme. We are keeping track of our understanding while reading and sharing our thoughts and I wonder statements. It was about a family who left their country by boat to come to America for a better life. Two of the themes we discussed were perseverance and immigration.
  • In this week's Weekly Reader we read and discussed articles about which famous American has our stamp of approval and how a U.S. veteran received a top medal for his actions.
Have a good weekend!
Abby and Cooper

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Weeks of Oct. 24th and Oct. 31

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During the week of Oct. 24th-
  • We had a dress rehearsal for our science projects. Teams of us created models of how the Sun, Earth and Moon work together.
  • Mrs. Randall read us a book called A Remainder of One. It's about division with a ladybug who always gets left behind because there is a remainder in division. We continued to create division stories.
  • We learned a strategy in multiplication called the double and half strategy. It helps us solve and make connections between two multiplication problems. For example, if you double one factor in an equation, and cut the second factor in half, the product is the same. For example, 12x6=72 and 24x3=72
  • We worked in pairs on multiplication and division equations.
During the week of Oct. 31st
  • We played division quizmo because we are strengthening our math brains to recognize quotients quickly.
  • We played a game called missing factors. It helps you practice multiplication and division by looking at an array card and figuring out the missing factor.
  • We read a short passage called The Eagle Has Landed. It's about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they went to the moon. It's about when they are in space and they are trying to land a lunar module to explore the moon.
  • Mrs. Randall read us a book called Mathematickles. It is about writing words+math+seasons=mathematickles. For example, holes + nuts - nuts = squirrel hide and seek. We are making some of our own mathematickles using the theme "fall" to hang on our bulletin board.
  • We went to Preston Pond to learn more about nature and our unit on interdependence. One thing we noticed was a lot of node stumps (cut down beaver trees). This means that this pond was an active beaver pond. This year was different from last year, because this pond was not active last year. We saw fresh beaver tracks, scat and some of us even saw a beaver! We also saw two different types of frogs and beaver slides. We saw moose or bear scat (we couldn't figure out which it was). There were also a lot of fallen down trees. We ate our lunch at Libby's Look. It was a beautiful view because you could see all of the mountains. Our sketches can prove it!
  • We read the story of Ruby Bridges to continue our questioning. We made a chart about what we we're learning and what we're wondering. Ruby was one of the girls who went to an all white school in New Orleans in 1957.
We had a great week because we learned a lot about observing outside!
Josh, Emaleigh, Emma, and Cooper

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Week of Oct. 17



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Monday-
  • We practiced our bus evacuation
  • We Skyped our buddies in Illinois and asked them some questions about their school and state.
  • We decided to create math videos to share with so that other students can learn more about math. We started with how to divide and how division connects with multiplication.
  • One thing that was interesting about our Illinois buddy class, was they don't have a hot lunch program at their school. Each student (k-5 school with at least 5 classrooms in each grade) brings their own lunch every day. They were very impressed with our lunch program!
Tuesday-
  • We continued with our NECAP tests. "I thought it was easy!" says Will.
  • We played a fun game called Missing Factors in math. It helped us by using arrays to find the quotient.
  • In music we sang songs.
  • We got a new student named Ceilidh. We are happy to have her! Welcome to our class Ceilidh!
Wednesday-
  • We went to the library to get new books.
  • We played tennis! It was very fun! This was a celebration for exceeding our pawsitive goal.
  • We practiced getting to the closest multiple in math.
  • Ms. Minor taught a lesson on creating multiple towers. I thought it was fun to see how many multiples my body was!
  • Mrs. Randall invited Mr. Bouchard in to tell a cool story about the legend of the Wolf Cow. It helps us remember the 14 counties.
  • Groups worked together on our science models to show rotation and revolution.
Thursday-
  • In art we learned about radio symmetry
  • In math we played division math games from our class web site. There is one really fun game that you have to put a bunch of numbers in a division equation to make it work.
  • Our class chose a news reel for our math video and we put it together and posted it.
  • We worked on using our spelling words in Spellingcity. We typed sentences using our words.
  • In social studies we are researching a county that we chose. It was fun to use GoogleEarth to walk the streets in our county!
We don't have school tomorrow!
Have a great weekend!
Will and Josh

Friday, October 14, 2011

Week of Oct. 10

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We had an awesome week! Together we did a great job raising hands to be respectful to others! We exceeded our goal of 250 pawsitives! We helped Mrs. Randall notice 257 pawsitives!
Here are a few of the things we learned this week-
  • how to write division stories
  • what to do with remainders in a division equation
  • more about the sun-did you know the sun is 93 million miles away from Earth?
  • what does revolve and rotate mean
  • Vermont's land is broken up into 6 physiographic regions
  • "I am learning more about Addison county" says Josh
  • "I learned that Blackbeard, the pirate, was real" says Emma
  • "I learned more about Washington county and how it has our state's capitol within it" says Abby
  • "I learned more about Orleans county" says Cortland
Here are a few of the things we did this week-
  • Completed the reading section of the NECAP test and the first math session
  • Mrs. Randall gave a book talk on a book called Smile.
  • Ms. Minor came in on Wednesday and helped us with math.
  • In PE, we played a game called Colony ball (it's similar to kickball).
  • In Spanish we learned how to say some weather words.
  • We completed a couple lessons in our cursive books
  • We played a grains of rice game on the computer to practice math and give back to others.
  • We played a math jeopardy game.
  • We created a notebook page of all our county information
  • We worked with our science buddies to plan our sun, moon and Earth model.
Have a great weekend!
Emaleigh and Mia