Investigating Matter

Today in science we began learning about matter by observing physical properties of objects and classifying matter as a solid, liquid, or a gas based on our observations. Each team had the following items each in its own bag: a red rubber ball, corn syrup, water, ice, and air. Each person in the team was responsible for measuring the mass of one of the items, and then everyone in the team passed around the objects and made observations using four of their five senses. (Can you guess which sense we did not use?) After making and discussing the observations, we classified the objects into one of the states of matter: solid, liquid, or a gas.

Check out our pictures of us measuring matter, observing properties of matter, and recording our data and observations in our science notebook:

Kindergarten Buddies

While a portion of our class is in orchestra on Mondays, the rest of us work on class projects; on Wednesdays, those of us not in orchestra visit our kindergarten buddies.

Last Wednesday, September 14, was the first time we met with the kindergarteners to read to them some fun books and get them excited about reading and learning!

Here we are standing in front of Mrs.Johnson's

kindergarten class for the first time as she introduces us.

Here Mrs. Johnson begins matching us to 

our new kindergarten buddies.

 

Check out how engaged we are with our kindergarten buddies

as we read to them exciting books about the alphabet!

 

Homophones

In spelling and language arts for the next couple weeks, we will focus on homophones. We will use the following video as a resource as we are learning about homophones:






While we realize the video is a bit silly, we also know that we normally learn better when we're having fun and being a bit corny. Plus, the video will be perfect inspiration for when we write and perform our own homophone songs!

First Day at the Greenhouse

Prime and Composite Numbers

Today we learned numbers can be classified as either prime or composite. The following skit is our first attempt at making a math video, so keep that in mind as you learn a little bit about prime and composite numbers!(By the way, it might be helpful to know that the students performing are pretending to be in P.E. during their skit.)

Bio Poems

While we began writing our bio poem drafts on the second day of school, we finally had time to edit, revise, and publish them this week. Before we even began drafting our own, we read through and analyzed some of these bio poems here: http://www.tooter4kids.com/classroom/bio_poems.htm. We have no idea what school these students are from, but we're grateful they published their poems online for us to look at for inspiration. When we finished discussing those bio poems, we used ReadWriteThink's bio poem template to help us organize our poems. (Click here to see the bio poem template we used.)

While some of us are still putting the final touches on our bio poems, here are several finished ones we'd like to share:

Factors

Lately, we've been reviewing and learning quite a bit about factors. We've played Factor Captor, Factor Bingo, and Falling Factors to help practice finding factors of numbers and to apply what we know about factors already. Today we also made and decorated factor rainbows like this one:

This is a factor rainbow for 12 since 1x12=12, 2x6=12, and 3x4= 12.

Here are some factor rainbows we made that are hanging up in our classroom: