Thomas – Friends are Family

Claire – The Vial of Courage

Otto – Love’s Necklace

Owen – Love’s Always There For You

Sawyer – The Guide of Life

Nina – Love is My Light

Lia – Friends and What They Do For You

Moussa – Family is My Home

Aaliyah – Being Yourself

Zara – The Real Me

Amir – The Helper’s Faith

Autumn – The Impact of Courage

One highlight I totally love about 5th grade is… Mystery Skype! Basically Ms. Gartside tweets and plans with another teacher from a different school in the world and they arrange for us to have a Skype. We have to guess (by asking yes or no questions) to see where they live! It’s Ms. Gartside and our first year doing it—and so far I think we have done either three or four!
We have various different jobs—like the mapper (narrows the state, city and country down,) info-researcher, questioner and replier, (talks to the other kids and asks and answers questions) runner (brings answers and questions from one group of people to another,) tweeters who live-tweet and a photographer. When we have Mystery Skypes the room just starts buzzing and almost everyone is always busy.
So far I have been a questioner and replier (look at the photo I posted,) a info-researcher and a tweeter. We were supposed to have one today, (Jan 30, 2013) but it was cancelled due to a snow day. Our friends we have been Skype-ing with live in Chicago, Ontario and Minnesota. They always guess our city pretty quickly! Once the school was in a tiny town and we couldn’t find them until the end! Turns out they were in Mahnomen, Minnesota. The kids in Ontario were very close to Niagara Falls-wouldn’t it be fun to go on a field trip there and meet them face-to-face? Eagerly looking forward to our next Mystery Skype!
by Claire

A Mystery Skype is a Skype call, but a very special one. You try to find out where in the world the other class’s school is before they find out ours. First you try to find out what country they are in, then their state (or county, province etc.), then their town/city and lastly their school. To figure out this information, you can only ask yes or no questions. The following rules are ones that depends on the one you prefer. The first option is: You can ask a question, and if the opposing class answers “yes,” then you get a bonus question (only one bonus question per turn.) The second option is: You can ask the other class a question, they answer, and then it’s their turn.
Now that I’ve explained how to Mystery Skype, I can now explain my experience. I love Mystery Skypes because I get to apply my knowledge of world geography and U.S. geography, while also getting to have special jobs for each person! For our Mystery Skype on December 7, 2012 my job was the questioner and replier, answering and asking all of the questions with Claire, the other questioner and replier. I thought that the Mystery Skypes are a really fun thing that most classes don’t get to experience!
by Owen

Mystery skyping is basically skyping with another class and trying to figure out their location and school, simple right? Not really. Although mystery skyping is so much fun, it’s hard work too! Each person get assigned to a job, here is a list of all the jobs: host, backchannel writers, runner, photographer, mappers, reasearchers, questioners, and question reasearchers. You have to ask yes or no questions to eliminate places on the map. Usually the places are in the U.S.A but we once had a class from Canada. So far we’ve done 3 mystery skypes and are improving each time. I really hope that we can continue doing mystery skypes and I think they’re really fun to do.
by Nina

A Mystery Skype is a Skype we do with other schools, and try to figure out where and what their school name is. The Mystery Skype we did today was with some 5th graders. My job was to say the question and answer the questions from the other class. I like Mystery Skypes because we work together as a team. Also I like tracking down where they are because it’s kind of like a game. When me and Nina wait for the answer to their question we have a little chat with the other school and it was kind of fun. There were some funny kids so I liked to talk with them, I think I made a new friend in a different school. I also like the feeling when we find where they are, I feel proud of myself and I feel the joy of winning. I think these feelings come to me because we worked hard. It was fun doing the Mystery Skype, I would definitely want to do it again.
by Thomas

In class we have been doing Mystery Skypes with other city schools from around the world. The way it works is that each class tries to guess were the other class located in the quickest way possible. For example a question could be “are you in a country 1,000 miles away from the north pole?” The questions can only be yes or no answers. My favorite Mystery Skype was with this 4th grade class from Canada. It was really hard to locate them at first but once we knew they were within 25 miles of Niagara Falls we easily got the answer. We also did one with a fifth grade class from a small town in Minnesota. That was really hard because their population was about 5,000 people, and we had 8 million. My favorite part about Mystery Skype is being a mapper and coming up with the questions. I found that Google Chrome is really useful when you have a general idea of the population, and know about were they are located, google earth was really useful because in our Mystery Skype with the Canadian class I searched Niagara Falls and then zoomed out until I was only seeing cities with a population of around 1,000. From there it was easy and we found the school in the next question. I have really enjoyed these experiences so far and hope to do another one soon.
by Otto

In our room our host was Lia and she talked about where we were, basically like an introduction. Claire was the answer writer, she wrote down all of the answers to the questions that we asked. Everyone else got to be questioners except for me and Owen. We were our tweeting team and we live tweeted throughout the skype. We tweeted to all of the schools that were doing 24 hour skype and sometimes tweeted to Epsom saying if they had some problems or not with the call -sometimes the video froze. Otherwise we were tweeting about what our class and Epsom were talking about. One of the questions that I think made us react the most was… THEY GET NO HOMEWORK! but otherwise it was just good getting to know that school and getting to actually see them – through technology!

Hurricane Sandy

Sandy also did cause floods and although all of them were minor there was the danger of that if we weren’t prepared. At the very peak of Sandy it was dangerous because there was raging winds and water leaking out of rivers. Some people were in boats with life jackets because the water was so high. There was also rain that would stop and go depending on what position the hurricane was in.

I hope you are safe from the danger Sandy caused. Kids in our class were not injured or our houses too badly damaged. One student did have to move to a hotel because of the flooding, but he is back home now.

Hi- this is Claire’s teacher, and the teacher of the Tech-Taters! I am adding these videos of the testing to Claire’s blog post. They are not all testing with the same speed in the videos, though we did on Friday! These are just the better videos to post instead of 1 really long one! Enjoy watching us test our vehicles.

sourpatchkidstest from katy gartside on Vimeo.

mad cocunut scientists test from katy gartside on Vimeo.

gliding jellydonuts test2 from katy gartside on Vimeo.

icebreakers test from katy gartside on Vimeo.

This week while reading the one and only Ivan Stella got her foot infected. She was in great pain. Meanwhile, a little baby elephant named Ruby came to the circus. She was afraid of course, because she used to be living in the wild. Ruby is a very loquacious elephant so she had no problem telling Ivan, Stella and Bob about her ups and downs in the jungle. She soon became so close to Stella that she started calling her Aunt Stella. She loved it when Stella and Ivan told her stories. As days went by Stella’s foot got worse and worse. It soon became so bad that she couldn’t walk. That night Stella asked for one favor from Ivan. She asked for him to take care of Ruby. Within the next few hours Stella passed away. Ruby was so sad and the next night she could not fall asleep so she asked Ivan to tell her a story. Ivan told her about how he was raised and when he lived with Mac and his wife. I wonder if Ivan is sad to talk about when he lived with Mac because maybe he at least had a so-so life because he wasn’t living in a cage. by Lia

We have planted seeds called Wisconsin Fast Plants in science. They are called fast plants because they go through their entire life cycle in only 6 weeks. Band has also started. This is the first year we get to be in band, and we get to choose which instrument we wanted to play. In our class we chose; saxophone, trumpet, trombone, flute, clarinet and drums. In Wellness we are learning to play team handball. We are making timelines of our lives. We have collected 2 entries from each year of our life, and now we are working on revising them to make them interesting to an audience. We will add photos of the fast plants as soon as we download them!