May 18 - 22

This week was a busy week! Our favorite activities were:
--seeing the storyteller, Eshu, perform. He told old folktales, including one from South Africa that was about a bird that made amasi. Two children lost the bird and went into the woods to find it but they almost got eaten by the zim, instead. He also taught us a fun game that we've been playing in class!
--performing in our poetry cafe today. We recited poems we memorized.
--reading to our k-1 buddies. We went outside to read today and had fun.

Our question to wonder about is:
How hot do you think it was this past week?

May 15, 2009

We haven't been able to write here for a long time because last week most of our class was away at Nature's Classroom! We missed the kids who couldn't come.
We had the GARP award ceremonies this week on Thursday.
In music we played a game where we were blindfolded and had to move through a maze with musical guidance. In gym, we played a similar game, called "Dark Destroyer", except instead of using musical guidance, we used our bodies and voices.
This week we chose a science fair topic and are starting to get ready for the science fair. Some people have already started their experiments and some people are still figuring out their experiments.
Today, when we got together with our buddies, we wrote poetry with them, after we read some of our own poems to them. We tried to make our voices sound more enthusiastic than the recording of the poet Billy Collins that we heard.

Our question to wonder about is:
Do you enjoy writing poetry?

April 29

We have been busy preparing our classroom for our Living History museum! Everything needs to be set up for tomorrow afternoon so we've been devoting a lot of time to creating our displays.

Nevertheless, we've also been making time for some poetry writing, examining ways to organize and analyze data, and learning about scientific experiments in the science lab.

We've been busy but we're having fun!

Thursday, April 23

Today was a half day, although it seemed like a full day. We had a lot of time for projects. We had a medium--hard obstacle course in gym. While some of us went to band, the rest stayed in class and were creative poets. They got to experiment with magnetic poetry.

Who are your favorite poets?

Wednesday, April 22

This morning we had a sub for half the day while Ms. Domina was learning about technology in the computer lab.
Today we worked on our living history museum! A lot of kids got started making their backdrops. Some kids made artifacts, such as whips and cotton plants, a sandstone slab, a newspaper, a headdress, and cloth bracelets.
A few kids in our class got to help paint the mural in the Science Lab.
Today is Earth Day. Our question for the day is:
What can you do to save the Earth?

March 30

Today we had D.A.R.E. and Health again. In D.A.R.E. the fifth graders learned about peer pressure. They learned that peer pressure can be negative or positive and they practiced ways of resisting negative peer pressure. In Health the fourth graders wrapped up their unit on Nutrition.
They talked about questions they still have about Nutrition and found out that there is a lot of complicated chemistry involved in understanding about what makes food healthy or unhealthy!

In library we started our project on Connecticut History and it was really interesting!

After lunch we were all surprised by a fire drill! It was a little chilly outside but once the wind died down we enjoyed the sunshine and the extra fresh air.

In class today we decided that we should do a living history museum to show off what we've been learning about in history. We're going to do it with Miss Cross's class! We're going to start work on it now but we won't finish it until after break.

We have two questions today:
Why does a butterfly fly?
What's your favorite state?

March 27

Today we had an ID assembly. Gabrielle and Maia did a great job of leading it! They also both read the introductions to their research papers to get students interested in their topics. Zoe-Kaye played the piano while she sang, and the rest of the class got the whole assembly clapping to the tune! Sejal provided the finale to the assembly, with her piano playing.

Right after the assembly we went to the book fair and had fun browsing around. We bought some great books that we're looking forward to reading (some of us already started reading them).

We also did pretzels at the end of the day, as we usually do on Fridays. Ms. Domina forgot that the bag of pretzels was running low so we had a lot more broken pretzels than usual, but it was okay.

Another special event that occurred today was that it was Hat Day! People wore some crazy hats!