Dress Up in Words!!

Every year the 5th graders, Dress Up in Words!! This year was no exception and we were impressed by the new adjectives we saw. The assignment was to pick your favorite adjective and create a hat, shirt or sign to showcase that word. We gave a prize to the 3 adjectives represented by these categories: Most Fun (Magical), Most Elaborate (Sick) and Most Unique (Festive). Check out the last picture to see our 3 winners!!

Pumpkin Seeds

On Friday in Exploration Alley the classes worked together to complete one more science experiment from start to finish. We wanted to give them one more chance to complete all of the steps before their Science Fair Projects are due on November 14th. Since it was so close to Halloween, we wanted to give them a easy, fun and cool experiment so we decided to have them compare the amount of seeds in a orange pumpkin and a tiger stripe pumpkin. The results were surprising. We found that the tiger stripe pumpkin had many more seeds than the orange pumpkin and we felt the reason was that the tiger stripe had less guts inside which allowed for more seeds to grow. Whiles the orange pumpkin had less seeds but more "guts" which would allow for someone to make flavorful pies.

Edmodo.com

Last week during Exploration Alley, all of the classes were introduced to a new website. This site is www.edmodo.com and is a great tool to help foster online discussions. The students are enrolled in two groups. One group is Rocket Scientists which has ALL of the 5th graders as active members. The second group is their own class group, either Jurgie's Crew or Peterson's Peeps. This groups allows Mrs. Peterson and I to post questions specifically for our classes. We are hoping that this site will allow us to take learning outside our four walls and make connections to the real world. Continue to check out the site for new tasks, questions and announcements.

Check Out Our New Apps!!

How do you dial up someone with the name that sounds the same but is spelled differently? With your IPhone homophone app that's how. Students were given a set of homophones that they had to put into app boxes. They were to include the definition, a sentence and of course an awesome illustration.

Which Liquid Dissolves a Chocolate Cream Cookie Fastest, Let's Put it to the Test!

Oreo cookies and No Name chocolate cream cookies were the test subjects in Exploration Alley. The students tested what type of liquid: soda, water or apple juice would dissolve these cookies the fastest. Who knew apple juice packed such a punch!!

Do You Know Whether an Oreo Brand Cookie Rolls Farther Than a No Name Cookie?

WE DO!!! We sure did have fun finding out. The students took part in this experiment in Exploration Alley. They were to roll an Oreo brand cookie down a ramp from the height of 6 cm. and then 10 cm. three times. Then they had to try it with the No Name cookie. Want to know what happened, well just ask your child!!

Moon Phase Fun!

This week we used Oreo cookies to make models of the moon phases. The trick was trying to make 5 phases out of 4 cookies. The students were not opposed to eating their way to success on this one!