5th Grade Book Critics

To show understanding of their book club projects, 5th grade students have been writing book recommendations to share with other fifth graders.  This is the beginning of a living document where students can find out about potential books by their peers.  Students are using Google Slides (like Power Point) to contribute to a collaborative document.  As students finish other books this year, they can write up recommendations to share with other students.  

Check out some of their work, and maybe even find a new book to read!

3rd Grade Investigates Communities

3rd grade students recently wrapped up their Sharing the Planet unit.  Their central idea was "Human and geographic factors shape communities."  Lots of different learning activities helped build student understanding of this idea.  

Students worked in groups to research various landforms on PebbleGo (one of our library research resources).  

Then,  they created a visual representation that included the important facts and information from their research and presented it to their class.

Students worked in groups and used Kidspiration (mind mapping software) to create Venn diagrams where they compared different types of communities such as rural, urban, and suburban.

Students interviewed a family member about the community they currently live in or where they grew up in order to learn about how that community developed.  Students created a timeline and presented it to the class.

Keith Abbott, a parent and local minister, shared photos and spoke to all of 3rd grade about how the hurricane in Haiti affected the community.

2nd Grade Uses Social Media to Research

Second grade students have been working on a unit that investigates the central idea: Humans manifest their characteristics differently.  One of their lines of inquiry was to investigate human characteristics that contribute to success and failure.  They needed to reach a large variety of people, so they decided to use the power of social media to ask the question, "how do you achieve success in life?" Second grade students have a technology standard that asks them to "use communication tools that allow for anytime, anywhere access to interact, collaborate , or publish with peers locally and globally." This was the perfect opportunity to reach other to others!

Second grade created a blog and then reached out to others to help gather information.  Email, Facebook and Twitter were all tools that were used to help spread the work about the inquiry.  People participated by leaving a comment on the blog.  Students then discussed the many things people credit for their success and how they might be able to plan for success themselves.  Drop by their blog and participate today- share your views of success!

5th Grade Gets Creative With Photoshop

5th grade students stretched their creative muscles while working on Photoshop projects.  Students took their self portrait, opened it into Photoshop and then used a variety of tools to experiment with the design principle of proportion.  By stretching, squeezing, recoloring and liquefying themselves, they were able to morph themselves into a variety of original creatures!

How tall are you - in inches, feet and centimeters?

5th grade students recently measured each other in math. The students used problem solving skills to convert to find their height in feet, inches, centimeters and millimeters   Students were able to see the relationship between the various units of measurements.
They applied what they learned about their own heights to the Very Tall Lady Exemplar problem. It asked them to find out how many kids their height would equal the height of the Statue of Liberty. 

4th grade wonders: what does it take to be a good leader?

4th grade's How We Organize Ourselves unit explored the central idea: Conditions within a community dictate the type of leaders that emerge. To help students understand this big idea, they hosted a panel of leaders. We had members of the community- our PTA president, Mrs. Olesen, Cristy Crowder and Ms. Welebob as well as Ms. Haynes and Ms. Herbst. Students asked the panel of leaders questions about what it takes to be a leader, qualities of a leader and how they became leaders. Students asked some great questions and were able to make connections to some of the leaders and leadership types they had been learning about in class.