Caine’s Arcade

On October 6th our class celebrated Caine’s Arcade. Students made arcade games out of cardboard and recycled materials. Their creativity was amazing!

2017/2018 5th Grade Class

I am so excited to be blogging with my class this year. We have 1:1 iPads and every student will be participating in the Student Blogging Challenge. Week #1 Challenge will be posted soon.

Mathercise

This summer I took a Digital Storytelling class from my friend, Jennifer Scypinski. Jennifer had us play around with some different apps. Below is what I created in class. I did a mash up with Chatterpix and Tellagami and put it all together in iMovie.

Oobleck! Liquid or Solid?

In science, we read Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. We are learning about the states of matter and students needed to determine if Ooblick is a liquid or solid. (image by: Wikipedia)

Ooblick is an amazingly weird substance. It is a non-Newtonian fluid. It has properties of both liquids and solids depending on how much pressure you apply. You can slowly dip your hand into it like a liquid, but if you squeeze Oobleck or poke it, it will feel solid. Below is our experiment.

Music by: “Pyro Flow” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

States of Matter – Measuring Volume

This year we are teaching Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for 5th grade. Our first unit is on Matter. We have discussed the 3 states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. One of our labs (from Science Matters, Lesson 3: Measuring Matter) involved measuring volume with liquid. Students used graduated cylinders and measured volume to the nearest mL. Each science team was given a specific set of directions that needed to be followed precisely. Directions are below.

 

Measuring Volume directions image

After completing the directions students needed to record their observations. Observation sheet is below.

observation image

 

If students accurately followed the directions, the final product results in all 6 cups with the same amount of liquid (mL) and arranged in a rainbow order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet).

Below is a slideshow of our experiment and success!

 

Marshmallow Challenge

The Marshmallow Challenge is an engineering design project that requires collaboration, creativity, and patience. The goal is to build the tallest freestanding structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. (image from wdsci.com)

marsh

Students actually did this challenge twice. The first time, they only had 5 minutes to discuss their plan of attack. All the students did an excellent job of working together, but the structures were not very effective. I talked with the students afterwards and they all wanted to try this challenge again after they had time to collaborate and do some research.  The second Marshmallow Challenge was a week later and students were prepared with drawn design plans and strategies. Chase, Rowan, and Bryan were the victorious team. Their structure was 55 cm tall and modeled after the Eiffel Tower!

Music by: “Life of Riley” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Tribute to Caine’s Arcade

In mid-September all three 5th grade classes were shown the video Caine’s Arcade. We invited the students to take part in the Global Cardboard Challenge.  Our hope was to inspire student creativity and engineering design. Students created games at home and brought them in for an afternoon of play on October 8th. We were amazed with the results!

Why Blog with Students?

Sometimes I think I am crazy for trying blogging with students, but then I remember how amazing the experience was with my 4th grade students last year. It was truly a labor of love. Blogging with students takes time and effort, especially if you want to do it right. I feel it is incredibly important to teach our students at a young age how to be digitally responsible. By blogging, I am definitely teaching this, but blogging teaches so much more. Below are the Top 10 Reasons for Students to Blog (image by: Sylvia Duckworth).

blogging image

How to Leave a Quality Comment

Our class has been practicing how to leave a quality comment. We started by doing paper blogging. Students were given a writing prompt. For the pictures below, the writing prompt was “My Favorite Place to Visit”. Students wrote about their favorite place to visit which we called our “post”. Next, I randomly handed out the posts and students used sticky notes to write quality comments on the post. On average, each student received seven comments to their post.

After we were done commenting, the posts were handed back to the original author. Students then read the comments and “rated” the comments according to the criteria that we came up with earlier in the week. The comments received a smily face if it was a quality comment and a frowny face if it was not at all a quality comment. No face was given if it still needed work to be a quality comment.

Students: What was your favorite part of this activity and why?

Students making quality comments:

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Digital Citizenship

Digital-Passport-landingPage_Hero

Digital Citizenship is the appropriate and responsible use of technology. At the beginning of the year, I had my students complete the requirements to receive a Digital Passport from Common Sense Media. Common Sense Media is dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology.  They empower parents, teachers, and policymakers by providing unbiased information, trusted advice, and innovative tools to help harness the power of media and technology as a positive force in all kids’ lives. I also taught the Digital Citizenship lesson plans from Common Sense Education.

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