Recess Time = Building Time

Apparently, Hatchet has Made Its Mark!

These students set their sights on making their own shelter as if they were Brian, the main character from the Gary Paulsen novel, Hatchet. To encourage them to continue, the fifth grade teachers got in touch with Sean Musselman, from the Burlington Science Center. He came with supplies, words of wisdom and a few scientific pointers to keep them on track. I can't wait to see how long this lasts. Nice job!

How Can We Prove How Sound Travels Best: Solids, Liquids or Gas

Sound Travels Best Through...

These steps guide us through our many scientific explorations. The students are beginning to grapple with, "This won't work." "We need to try it some other way!" And "What if we tried this instead?"

There's nothing like the moment when the students start to take on the responsibility of planning their own experiments to answer their own questions. In a very slow process, the children are overcoming the obstacles such as the differences between experiments and research, guessing and hypothesizing and test validity - will it happen the same way every time we do it?

Some of their ideas blew my mind. One group tested sound using the cup as a solid, the water in the cup and then just the tuning fork in the air. What they found...well, I guess you have to ask.  Others struggled with the idea of testing sound using their ears to measure. This became an interesting conversation that brought about revisiting that sounds are vibrations.

How tos

Look through the book and consider various ideas for your How to Explain Everything. List at least three
strong ideas here and give three ideas you have about different ways to demonstrate your lesson.

Remember, I did How to Round Numbers. My examples included rounding up, rounding down, rounding using decimals and finally leaving one example for the audience to solve. Once given enough time, I gave the answer.

Be sure that you list three different ideas with three different ways to demonstrate it using something we've learned already.

Idea 1: How to round number

• round up
• round down
• round using decimals

Idea 2: How to add

• add using zero
• add without carrying
• add using carrying

Idea 3: Determining angles

• example of acute angle
• example of right angle
• example of obtuse angle

What Do We Do First Thing Every Morning?

It really depends on the day! Sometimes we read messages in regular print and cursive.

And sometimes, we define new vocabulary using wordsmyth.com. We add these words to our word wall and try to use them in conversation. 

Sometimes, we try to draw pictures of descriptive sentences. 

Occasionally, we finish work for science or Social Studies.

And even still, we might even review some old science topics by visiting BrainPop, Wonderopolis and even more.

Used Bookstore

First used Bookstore

Wednesday, November 18
Bring a quarter or a book  to trade.

Explain the Remainder

On Monday this week, we did a word problem that was solved using division and resulted in a remainder. The original problem was:

Suppose you have 134 stamps in your collection.  You want to display them on 5 pages of an album with about the same number of stamps on each page.  About how many stamps should go on each page?

To solve, first we had to estimate. We saw many different estimates. 150/5, 135/5 and even 130/5. Any of these estimates are reasonable. To check our work we did the real division which resulted in 26 r 4. This meant that 4 of the 5 pages would have 27 stamps and one page would have 26 stamps.

This week, please write your own word problem that

• uses division to solve
• requires estimation
• requires the actual answer
• results in a remainder
• requires an explanation of that remainder

Make sure you write the problem and do all the work!

Francis Wyman PTO WANTS You to be able to Show Your School Spirit

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