Tech-Taters

It is seven school days until IPW starts and the grade is ringing with conversation of what it is going to be like.  There were many choices this year, including Happening in Harlem which is an IPW all about Harlem.  Kids will get to explore the culture of Harlem and even eat in some of their restaurants!  Another one of the IPW choices is Black Rock Leaders.  Kids will be able to spend a week in Black Rock exploring the outdoors and the nature in the deep forests.  Those are only two of the many choices that kids might be in, all of them are going to be fun.  I can tell that this IPW year is going to be a good one!

On Friday, February 4, 5A and the rest of the 5th grade are putting on a performance.  We will have choreography, music and shadow puppetry.  We are going to base the whole concert on 4 poems, one for each class.  We are going to be playing instruments to the poem, the shadow puppetry about the poem, and the dance about the poem.  5A’s poem is “A Well Sits in a Small Yard.”  In art we have been making the shadow puppets by cutting out pieces of paper with scissors or an Exacto knife.  We are going to act out the play with the shadow puppetry.  In dance we have been choreographing our dances, we split up into mini groups to create the dance and then at the end we all mended together to make on dance.  I hope many of our families can come to the performance!

Today we had a special visit. This year we are studying ancient china. Some musicians from the Music in China group visited our school. Music in China is a group of Chinese musicians. They introduced us to a few instruments. There was one that looked like a violin, except the bow was attached to the string. It also had a snake skin box on its bottom, which affected the sound. Another one was like a little guitar, except with a few variations. Its strings where nylon wrapped over steel, and they were so hard that you have to wear plastic nails to play it. Over all, the performance was very interactive, fun, and interesting. I hope many people have enjoyed it as much as I.

-Catherine

Music in China

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

We took photographs of different spaces in our school, and Claire and Catherine created a movie using Animoto.  We take up 6 floors of a building in Manhattan, and our playspace is on the roof!

Tomorrow, Friday the 15th, all the fifth grade will perform their air bands. It. is the Rock the Block Assembly, where if you want to do a dance to a song with friends, you can, but it is in front of  grades 3, 4 and 5. We are all very excited. Today we had a practice, and tomorrow we will have another practice before the assembly. It will be great!

Some songs people are doing are The Gummibear song, Baby, Jukebox Hero, Hey Soul Sister, Dynamite and many others. So, tomorrow, class 5A will excitedly shuffle down the stairs and in to the MPR. Everyone will laugh, sing and cheer as Air-Banders go up on the stage and have their  45 seconds of singing, dancing, and star power. And I, for one, and hoping for some good costumes!

-Claire

Hi world -

Welcome to the blog of 5A! We are going to write about what we are learning and thinking about in our class. We are 5th graders living in New York City. This year we are going to be studying the ancient civilizations of China and Greece. First we are learning about how archaeologists learn about life in the past by examining artifacts.

There are only 12 students in our class – it’s probably the smallest class in our school! We have a small classroom though, so we wouldn’t fit many more kids in! This year our teacher is trying out some new things – one is a standing desk that has a swing bar. If you are a fidgety type of kid you would probably really like it. You can be swinging your leg while you are doing your work, and you wouldn’t be distracting anyone else. Something else we are trying out this year are yoga balls. We have 3 in our room, and we can switch our regular chair for the yoga ball.

Please come back and read more about what we are doing!