It didn’t take long for students to start using the DeskCycle. In fact, all of our 15 minute slots were immediately taken after I posted time sign-ups on our whiteboard. Great that the kids are excited to move and great that they are opting into exercise. Most are reporting burning over a 100 calories in their short turns on the cycle.

 

We were very fortunate in having the Sierra Watercolor Society visit our classroom and share their expertise with us. We engaged in careful observation of how watercolors work, learned more about the medium of watercolors and were instructed on specific techniques to take full advantage of the watercolor palette we worked with.

The finished product will serve as a terrific holiday gift. Moreover, there was no cost to the students or Roy Gomm. Instead, the four volunteers shared all the necessary supplies and a lot of their time.

Thank you parents for sharing such a great celebration with the kids!

Thank you to all the families who visited us for lunch today. Apart from sharing a meal, we also explored blended learning through adaptive technology, 21st Century communication, and “gamification.”

Today we continued to work with the ideas of concentration, dilution and volume. To help with this, we created an experiment in which students manipulated solutions to determine the effects on volume and mass. Ultimately, this experiment not only built greater understanding with the Next Generation Science Standards but also proved a terrific introduction to volume.

Today we got another visit from art teacher Joy Brackney. Mrs. Brackney shared with the students how to mix mediums with a Halloween themed piece of art.

Today students started their investigation into saturation. In this case, students added salt to water until the solution became saturated. Students then used a balance to determine the amount of salt that went into the solution.

This investigation is just beginning and we will learn about citric acid and how to compare crystals in the coming days.

We are establishing our peer editing process in which we sit in a circle, pass our Writing Journals to each other, and identify strengths in what we are reading from colleagues. This is a strategy first introduced to me by Kitty Gillette, a 4th grade teacher at Westergard Elementary, and it has proven to be a great way of building classroom community. Moreover, it helps everyone become better writers.

Today we started learning about the properties and behavior of different substances. Our first experiment is allowing us to get closer to understanding to fundamental ideas of chemistry including being able to describe mixtures and solutions. Over the coming weeks we will learn about density, mass, solubility, and chemical reactions.