In honor of President's Day, fifth grade is doing a research project on different presidents. Students where broken up into groups and they each selected a president. This year they are researching: Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, William Taft and George W. Bush. They are mainly using non electronic resource materials to find out information on each of them. When they have all their information they will then trace one person and create a almost life size poster and display the information around their president, Stay tune to see the final product.
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In social studies we are learning about the early explorers. Students used their scence of smell to identify foods that came from the New World such as corn, tomatoes and chocolate. In science we began the month learning about simple machines. The students looked at everyday items and identified the simple machines that make it up. Students learned what a force is and learned about friction which will lead us into our motion and design Einstien kit. Mrs. Mathu came in and spent the morning with us and did some science exoeriments about Newton's 3 laws of motion which was a great introduction for our science kit.The students learned a lot and had a great time. For their final challenge the students had to build a bridge that could hold their textbooks. The second round of the challenge one group built a bridge that held over 39 books! We are now working on our new science kit. In reading we are working on visualizing while we read. Students had to illustrate a poem using what they pictured in their mind as they read it. We are also working on using evidence from the text to support our answers. The Cake Walk is next Thursday Feb. 9th, this will also be the day for our Valentine's Day party. If students woukd kike they The class has been very excited about this project and I can tell they worked very hard on them. They all had a chance to share some intresting things they learned about their tribe. They discovered that some of their tribes lived in the same region and had similar homes, food or beliefs. We are now moving into our unit on Exploration. In science we just finished our unit on cells. to help review the parts of a cell the students built an edible cell. For the cell wall we used a paper cup to give it shape. The cell membrane we used a ziplock bag to hold the contents of the cell together. For cytoplasm we used jello, close to a clear jelly like fluid. For the Mitocondria we used small pearl balls becuase they where small organell but mighty. Green gobstoppers represented the chloroplast which trap sunlight to make food for the plant cells and smarties for the Vacoules. For the "boss" (nucleus) of the cell we used large lemon heads. It sounds pretty gross but they enjoyed it and hopefully helped them make a concret connection to the parts of the cell. In our new unit in science we are studying about atoms, elements and the periodic table. So far we have learned that everything is made up of atoms. Today we read about how everything is arranged in a certian pattern and scienctist can study patterns of crystals by using an x-ray diffraction machine. The x-ray beam passes through the crystal and creates a pattern on the film. Scientist can use that pattern to then create a modle of the crystal. We where able to create a modle of a salt crystal using red and green gum drops and by taking our individual salt modles and conntecting them togerher we created an even larger salt modle all in the same shape making sure to follow the pattern making sure that the same colors where not touching. We have started our studies of Native Americans in both North and South America. During this unit students will be working on a research project studying a tribe of their choice. Each student will research and find out information about the type of shelter they lived in, the food they eat and the type of clothing they wore. They then have to choose a fourth topic to research about. They will display their information in a triorama making one for each topic. Each Trioroma should have a detailed paragraph and a colorful, 3-D display. Students have already created the structures for their projects and have a few class periods to work on it. They can work on their projects after they complete their work and can ask to use some of their recess time if they need to use the chromebooks to do their research or typing.
We are applying what we have learned about observation and magnification to take a closer look at the smallest living unit the cell. In this chapter we are learning about the two different classification of cells, Eukaryotes (plant and animal cells) and Prokaryotes (bacteria) We have learned that the major difference between the two is the Eukaryotes are very organizes, with many organelles surrounded by membranes and Prokaryotes are very simple, with no organelles surrounded by membranes. During our Einstein kit we had a chance to learn about and use microscopes and students were able to create slide of an onion skin and take a closer look and see the cells that make that onion.This week students applied what they learned about preparing a slide and made one of their cheek cells. We have a few microscopes in our classroom that students had a chance to view their slides and see the cells. To get a better look, students used a virtual microscope to look at a prepared slide of cheek cells. The virtual microscope works just like a regular microscope, you have to adjust the focus and lighting and make sure the slide is in the right place. This allowed them to see the cell in more detail than we could in the classroom and could see some cell parts. Last Friday the fifth graders got together with their reading buddies for some Halloween fun. We split the group in half for some fun and learning. One group worked on a science project making some spooky slime. We talked about how we needed to gather our materiala and follow the directions. We also talked about how sometimes an experiment doesn't work and we have to make adjustments as we go. This happened with ours, we decided the directions had us use too much water, so we tried adding more glue. The students did a good job taking turns and following directions. The other group were |