Week 5

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Hi!  Again, the students learned a lot this week, and we had a great time.

An older student at "the wall" (a 300+ foot traveling Washington D.C. Vietnam War mural display that all grades got to visit at Fort Bridger this week)

Student inventing a way to keep his desk lid propped up for science

Student inventing a desk lid prop out of duct tape, paper, and a popsicle stick.  It worked really well, surprisingly.

Student inventing during science

Boomerang, our class bee

Our class preparing for an experiment.

Funny Sayings from Kids: This week we had a bee fly into our classroom!  So I caught it and let it go a long way away from our classroom door.  When kids were filing in from the next recess, the bee came in too.  After repeating this several times, I finally decided we could just keep the bee as a class pet.  The students came up with several names, including “Bee Gee.”  (I wondered whether they knew the Bee Gees were a band or not.) We ended up naming it boomerang because it keeps coming back!

While on a mini field trip at Fort Bridger, we saw a big picnic/stage pavilion.  One student thought it was a church!

When asked by our guest teacher (explained below under “special activities”) to sit up in a “learning position” a student responded that it was okay because his position was still a “reverent position.”

When our guest teacher had to leave the room to visit with Mr. Limoges (the high school principal), one student said, “Is she in time-out?”

Special Activities: We got to visit “the wall” in Fort Bridger.  It is a traveling replica of a mural in Washington D.C. about the Vietnam war.  Also, students had a sub on Monday for the first time this year.  In addition, we had a reading teacher trainer from Texas visit the school this week.  She taught an example lesson in my classroom.  The students behaved very well on all three occasions. 

Academics: This week in math we reviewed writing numbers, and we talked a lot about addition and subtraction stories (word problems).  We also did math facts, and students are really progressing well on those.  For writing, we did some fun prompts where students have described funny pictures to practice using complete sentences.  Our reading and spelling focus was ending -ck words, where we learned that if there’s a short vowel sound, you use ck at the end of a word (back, tick, etc.).  In social studies, we went on a field trip to “the wall” as mentioned above.  It was great for students to see how many people have fought and died for our freedom.  For science, I let students hypothesize, design, and experiment ways that they can hold the “lid” of their desks up so that it is not constantly falling on them when they try to get something out of their desks.  I explained how they are “thinking like scientists” to solve real problems and come up with real solutions.  We also did an experiment where water will not spill from a bucket if the bucket is swung in a circle quickly enough.