Tech-Taters

Just this week (after coming back from a very restful spring break) we started a new maths project. We are designing our own bicycle race course! First we decided how long we wanted to make our course. Then we had to figure out where the water, food, resting, (let’s not forget the bathroom), and signs were going to be on our bike course. Now, we couldn’t just choose them randomly because if we put all the water at the beginning, and the food at the end, you might get kind of hungry while in the middle. So we had to space them perfectly evenly, maybe you would have a food station every 1/4 of the track. And then we had to figure out how far that would be on your course, and where they would be. And then you are ready to make the race! We had a two day race, if you were in it you would bike to the end of the track, sleep in a hotel for the night, and be ready to start fresh in the morning. And after all that, then you can design how you want your race course to look. Let the race begin!

Today (24th March) we had our first IPW meeting! IPW (intergrated projects week) is a fun week at our school where we pick activities that we might want to do, and instead of just having a few hours where we might do that something that we picked, we have a whole week to do it. We sometimes have sleepovers, and marshmallows, and even if we don’t, everyone ends up having a great time. We always have two meetings in the weeks leading up to the actual IPW week, so that everyone is prepared for what we will do in the IPW. Usually we take a survey, and the survey shows all our different IPW options. Then we pick our top five, in order from the ones we would most love to get, to the ones we’d like to do but not our favorite choices. Even if you don’t always get your first choice, and you go to the meetings with a heavy heart, it always turns out well, and you end up hoping you get the same thing next year. And it turns out that right after that we have our spring break- a break from all that fun and exciting stuff. IPW is just beginning this year, and we can’t wait!

Nicholas

Lately we have been working on a new maths project- our own rooftop garden in which we can grow and design. Some of us had 110 square meters to use, and some of us had 100 square meters to use. We could design our shape, as long as the shape held the number of square meters that we were going to use- 100 square meters or 110 square meters. We picked our own vegetables, and figured out the cost for them too, and the cost for the soil we were going to use. Some restrictions applied to the seeds for the vegetables, like one pack of seeds would cover 1.5 square meters of ground, and we could not waste any ground in New York, so we had to do a little bit of rounding. We cut out our own shapes and drew in or colored in the shapes where our vegetables would go. We figured what fraction each vegetable was of the entire garden, and wrote that on our garden. Finally, we wrote our costs added the vegetable cost and the soil cost to find the total cost of my garden, and finished it up with a poster. Here are some pictures of our posters. Get ready for some more of our stunning maths investigations!

- Nicholas

Today author David Getz came to our school. We have been studying ancient man and we read a book by David Getz about a frozen man that was found in the Alps by two German hikers. The story goes on to describe how the scientists realize that the body is actually very old: the man lived about 5300 years ago! We took notes on the story and later we will have a quiz.

Author David Getz talks to 5th grade in the library

We are still studying the body today and it is amazing that we are, for the number of coincedinces that happened to make the body able to be studied is amazing. Some of them were: that it was in a crevice so a glacier could not squish and destroy the body. Also it was very important that the summer that year was especially hot and that a dark sandstorm sent dark dust on the Alps and that caused them to melt, because dark colors attract heat.

We learned many things about David Getz today, he was a teacher as well as writer and he wrote many books.  First he was a teacher and then he started writing books. Many of his books were science fiction so his editor suggested writing a actual book based on facts but not just a “fact book”. He couldn’t find something to write about until one day he was reading a story about the “frozen man” in the natural history magazine and thought “hey, this sounds interesting. I know kids like kind of disgusting stuff so maybe I could write a book about this.” And he did, writing the Frozen Man. He has also wrote other books based on true stories.

One of them was about two hikers who were hiking on a mountain and come across a young girl who looked to be about twelve. She was dead and looked kind of old, she was all dried out like the frozen man. The men recognized her as a Inca, a tribe in that area. She looked very young and they were wondering how they would bring her down. If they left her then animals might eat her before they came back and if they brought her down they might be arrested for being Incas before they could get her to a university. In the end they covered her with their backpack matieral. In the end they made it to the University and were able to examine the girl. In both these books David Getz was able to talk to top experts about those subjects. He is currently teaching as a principal. We were very honored to have him come and are glad that he came.
Nicholas