Mars Curiosity Virtual Field Trip

On December 12, we ate lunch in the classroom together and experienced our first live virtual field trip at NASA's headquarters in Washington D.C. through Discovery Education's live event called "i.am.STEAM, Journey to the Extreme." During the event, NASA scientists shared their latest discoveries of Mars and Mars Rover Curiosity, and we were able to enjoy our lunch while taking notes, taking pictures, and tweeting about our learning. 

To view the videos we experienced live, click HERE.

Check out some of the tweets we shared with our followers during the event, in ascending order (first ones we tweeted are last). 

Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

On the Curiosity the tire has Morse code -Isaac #iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

Mars has Mars quakes it's not caused by tectonic plates it's caused by asteroids. ~ Madison

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

@lacrossescience I think so to, it is really interesting.~Delaney#iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

I learned all the rocks on Mars are the same kind of rocks here &Mars is the color red because it has lots of iron in it. ~Delaney #iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

We are live with Mars Curiosity VIrtual field trip and they are telling us info about Mars it is awesome:-) -Mariah #iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

@lacrossescience Through live streaming on Discovery Education where NASA scientists are sharing about Mars Curiosity #iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

#iamsteam We are still waching the video and it explained how Curiosity landed!!~Jaden

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

#iamsteam Mars is colored by rusted iron!

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

I learned that five to six thousand people worked on the rover and Mars had water but is dry now _Caitlyn #iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

The new rover, Curiosity, is planned to be on Mars for 2 years! ~Lexi#iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

Well what I learned is that theres a rover called IOpportunity. ~Austin#iamsteam

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Room 121 ‏@room12112 Dec

#iamsteam we are sitting in the class room and are watching a live video about Curiosity.~Bailey #iamsteam pic.twitter.com/z6eg1ulj

Holiday Party Video

Grinchy Adjectives

On the last day of school before winter break, we reviewed adjectives (words that describe nouns) and used the song "Mr.Grinch" to help us practice identifying them. (At some point, I read about a more elaborate version of this idea HERE, which helped spark the idea.) 

Anyway, we first pasted a picture of The Grinch from here into our Thoughtful Logs (as pictured below). Then we watched and listened to this video that played the song, along with the lyrics, to identify adjectives. 

For independent practice, we created the chart below to help us generate sentences beginning with nouns, so we could become familiar with adjectives as words which describe nouns. 

The requirement was to generate at least 10 simple sentences, but many of us had so much fun practicing that we ended up doing far more!

Ornamental Polygons

In math, we wrote used the properties of polygons to write polygon riddles and one day after school, McKenzie and Jaden came up with the idea to make them into ornaments for a holiday tree on our classroom door. Since it was their idea, they designed and created the trees, the snow,  the sign, and the name on the sign ("Ornamental Polygons"). When it was time to actually hang the ornaments, Mariah and Bailey came up with the idea to use yarn and actually hang them on the tree, so they took over hanging all the ornaments. Mariah also had the idea for the stars on top of the trees, so she made those as well.

For the ornaments, we wrote the riddles inside and the shape of the ornament is supposed to be the answer to the riddle. Some of the polygons some of us chose were really difficult to draw--especially the polygons with multiple pairs of parallel sides!

Festive Winter Surveys

In December, we created and conducted festive winter surveys as a mini math project for collecting and analyzing data since we were getting pretty excited about upcoming holiday events. First, we brainstormed possible survey topics with our partner. Then we chose a topic and came up with three possible choices for conducting the survey among our class. After we conducting the survey (which was quite a bit more complicated that we realized!), we used the results to create a bar graph and pie chart from chartmaker.mathwarehouse.com as visual representations of our findings. 

If you look carefully on the pie chart, you will notice we also began to learn a little bit about converting fractions to decimals and percents (but not securely, as that was not the main focus of the project). 

Math Movie: Rounding Decimals to the Nearest Whole #

Mystery Skyping Mr.Avery's Class by Jaden and Bailey

**Note: no corrections were made to student writing.


We were all getting ready to Skype with Mr. Avery's class

We are getting ready in our job spots.

We called Mr. Averys class and we are introducing our selfs.

what we do is if they get a question rite they get to ask another one and

the same goes for us! Here are some questions they asked us;

if we live in the northern hemisphere,if we live west of the prime meridain, if we live in North America and if we live in the U.S.A.

They asked do we live east of California.

We lowerd the number of states that they could live in down to 24The names are:

Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida

Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky
Maine, Maraland, Massachusetts, Michigan
Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont,Virginia
 Wisconsin, West Virginia,
Washington, D. C. (not actually a state, but shares many qualities of a state...)

   . Now we are asking questions our first one is does your state have a coast line.They asked do we live east of California.There state does not boarder Caorlinia. They asked do we boarder Kansas they asked if we live in Missouri and they got it right and they live in Matsachuses! It's about 10:00 on December 6th, 2012 and the mystery Skype is over!

Common Noun Candy Canes

To help us review common nouns in a fun, festive way we created common noun candy canes. 

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. Nouns can be common or proper. If a noun names a specific person, place, thing, or idea (like Logan, Florida, Charlotte's Web, or February), it's a proper noun. If a noun is general person, place, thing, or idea (like guy, state, book, or month), it's a common noun.