Book Talk- Hannah

Hannah just finished reading the new book from Scholastic called "Pie" and was written by Sarah Weeks. It is a very suspensful book with a surprise twist! She just couldn't put it down and read it in a couple of days! I'm going to add this one to my list of must reads!

Story Web

In reading we have been learning about story structure and how that relates to fiction stories. For our totally hands-on Tuesday, we created a story web where students had to add to our story piece by piece. When a student added a piece to our story, they threw the yarn ball to that person and hung on to the string. Our story got a little silly with all the zombies that came into the mix, but it was fun and great to see the rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution coming to life through their imaginations!

Write Chats

Write chats (or sometimes called Placemat Concensus) is a great way for students to write each other notes in class, without getting in trouble, and discussing topics related to what we are learning in class! Take a poster and write the topic in the center and then let them write away! They can respond to each other's writing and even add new questions to ask each other as long as it is focused on the topic. It's also very quiet, because they have to complete the task without talking! We completed this write chat on Thanksgiving Traditions since we were getting ready to get out of school for our Thanksgiving Holiday Break!

Science Journals

Take a look at our table of contents for our science journals! As you can see, we are working hard and documenting our findings and wonderings in our science and math journals. By keeping a table of contents in our journals, it makes it really easy to find certain topics! A special thanks goes to Cameron for sharing his journal with us!

Edible Soil

On our Totally Hands-On Tuesday, we created edible soil to go along with what we have studied recently in science. We finished up Science Court yesterday and have been discussing the layers of soil, with bedrock being on the bottom, then subsoil, and then humus. Here are some pics from our edible layers and we added a few worms as well!

If you would like to make this at home, we used graham crackers as the bedrock, pudding as the subsoil, and crumbled oreos as the humus. We used gummy worms for the worms on top and we discussed how worms provide nutrients to the humus.

Book Talk- Zoe

Zoe did a book talk on the book, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid- Rodrick Rules". Read this book- it's great!

Soil Experiment

We conducted a soil experiment today after learning about the layers of the soil. In the containers above we had the substances of clay, sand, and humus soil. We drew the layers in our science journals and discussed how the bedrock is the bottom layer, with subsoil on top of that. Then we have top soil and humus. Humus is made of decaying plants and animals and contains lots of nutrients for the plants to grow. We discussed which type of substance would be the best to grow plants.

Next week, we are going to create edible layers to eat with worms (gummy, of course)!