Tech-Taters

Our class had a family share. One thing we did was showed our parents is our memoirs. It was very fancy for us, we used ribbons and expensive paper our parents must have been surprised. We also made Chinese chops and we got to use carving tools. We did have a lot of homework to learn some Chinese characters. We showed funny martial art videos that we made, I wonder what our parents thought of that! Then there is the long lab report we showed from science class.   The lab reports were about plants and were a heavy load of work.  In writing we have been working on memoirs, and most of us only finished and published them yesterday – only just in time! We made covers for them, and shared them with our families. Some of us wrote in narrative form, and others chose to write in poetic form. It was hard but they came out great. Since we are studying ancient China we made shapes with tangrams and we figured out the area depending on the length of the square. We all were given different lengths, so the area of our shapes were different. Our parents tried the tangrams and we showed them our tangram posters. We also showed the math poster video that Ms G. recorded when we presented our polygon project to the class – we each chose different polygons and had to use what we knew about triangles and quadrilaterals to figure out the number of degrees in the polygon. I think now I will skip to the most fun part- we had a 24 game tournament and the kids won 88 to 44! We kids doubled them exactly. It was great sharing our work with our families.

We have buddies they are in first grade, we do lots of activities with them. Like last Friday us and our buddies took some milk cartons, at lunch we drank them, then we cleaned them, when we were with our buddies the milk cartons still had milk in them, so it was kind of a mess. Anyway we took our milk carton and went over to the soil, (we had to help our buddies during this, but some of them insisted on doing some of the stuff) we filled part of the milk carton with soil, then we got a bulb, we helped our buddies to plant the bulbs. Then we filled the milk carton with soil some more. But we still weren’t done yet, we let our buddies choose what type of paper with a design on it. Then we got some glue sticks and stated to glue the back of the paper, some of our buddies insisted on using the glue stick and sticking it on the milk carton, that ended up in a sticky mess. Then we had to choose what string we wanted for the handle of the milk carton. In the end we were all happy!

We just came back from our over night trip at Black Rock Forest. Black Rock is a forest with wild life and lots of diverse and interesting plants. The bus ride was about 2 hours but time flies when you are having fun. Finally we got to the place were we would be staying, it was a lodge with two wings a Boy’s Wing and a Girl’s Wing. In each wing there were bunk beds and closets. Every one was with al least 5 people in one bunk room. The bunk rooms were named after trees like Cedar, Pine or Oak. in the middle was a common area were every one ate and after activities or hikes we gathered there. We were not allowed to wear our outdoor shoes in there. Then we went on a hike- there were 4 hikes to choose from. One of the hikes was ‘slow’ and there you looked around at the beautiful surroundings and really did not hike. Then there was ’Moderate’ which was a slow and easy hike. There was ‘Challenge’ which is a bit faster on a hard hill. Finally there is ‘Super Challenge’. In Super Challenge you basically ran and hiked 2 mountains. I did the Super Challenge and some of the people (like me) got lost at times but we followed the trail and eventually were with the group again. When everyone was on their hikes they had lunch. After the tiresome hike everyone changed and went to an activity. The activities were science, geo caching, water color, photography, trail clearing and the acorn activity. When we finally finished our activity we ate dinner. After we ate dinner we went on a 2 mile night hike. It was really scary because it was a windy night so the clouds were moving fast and it looked like the moon was moving. But finally we got to a camp fire. We had s’mores and sang songs and finally we walked home. We all slept and had breakfast in the morning. We had one activity then lunch. Then another activity and it was time to go home. Nobody wanted to leave but we had to. Everyone sadly said goodbye to Black Rock and we went back to our home sweet homes.

Toasting marshmallows for s'mores

In Science we have recently been learning about pollination, flowers, and plants, and we finished up by creating a video to show what we had learned. We all learned about how a bee can come over to a flower to drink nectar and without meaning to gets pollen on its body. Then the bee would go to another flower, get the pollen onto the new flower. Now this flower would be pollinated. Like before the bee would get pollen onto its body and move on after drinking the sweet nectar. The cycle repeats over and over again. We all did something very similar to that, some people used birds or butterflies instead of bees. Some people had technical problems. Others had trouble voice recording over the video of theirs in less than 4 takes. In the end everybody finished it up with not one problem. I hope you enjoy.