Thursday, December 10th

Hello everyone!!  We are wrapping up our study of fairy tales and moving onto fables.  Today, we read our last fairy tale, The Princess and the Pea.  The students then broke off into groups to write their own fairy tale.  We were only able to finish our sloppy copies of these modern day fairy tales.  Hopefully, tomorrow we will be able to post them on the blog.

Our first fable was The Ant and the Grasshopper.  Diligently was our vocabulary word of the day.  +

For our fairy tale challenge of the day, the students had to design parachutes that would safely take the princess to the ground from a tall ladder.

Count Down!!

Today in math we played two fun games.  One of the games is called Count Down. We did not play with poker chips, but colored chips we have in class.  

This is a great game to play when you are waiting for something, like the doctor or at a restaurant. I like it because it is easy to carry 11 chips in my purse and is a little more challenging than tic tac toe.   Check out this link to learn how to play and see videos. 

Count Down

The second game that we played was cover up- 

Google Expedition comes to Hardy!!

Google Expedition came to Hardy today!!   It was a fantastic experience, where the kids were able to go on a virtual field trip without even leaving the library.

Here is an article on Google Expedition and what it is all about. 

http://www.greenbot.com/article/2927976/googles-expedition-gives-schoolkids-google-cardboard-and-phones-so-they-can-go-to-the-moon.html

In reading today, we continued our study of fairy tales with the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk.  The students read the story together for a buddy read and we worked on our retelling skills.  We also read a spin off version called Jim and the Beanstalk.

For our STEM challenge today, the students had to design a beanstalk that would hold the most weight out of newspaper, tape, and a Styrofoam plate.

In P.E. this week, the students have been working on bowling.  They are doing such a great job of keeping score!

Our trip to Israel

Yesterday, we traveled by helicopter to Israel.  While in Israel we listened to the countries National Anthem, learned what other countries boarder this tiny country, and learned about their Festival of Light, Chanukah.  We also read some Chanukah stories that resembled the German version of The Gingerbread Man and played the dreidel game.

  Want to learn more about Chanukah?  Here is the PBS video that we watched.  Chanukah-

Happy Friday!!

Today was a very exciting day in our classroom.  To kick off our day we worked with magnets, learning about their magnetic fields.  We then watched a short video on compasses  How Compasses Work  and then explored with real hand held compasses.

In social studies today, we learned reviewed what producers are and learned about the different types of resources (human, capital, and natural)

In the afternoon, we held our first Maker Space.  I would like to thank all of the parents who came out to help us, I could not have done this without you.  Here are some of the stations that the children went to:

Brush Bots-  Video for Brush Bots  


Little Bits-

Website for Little Bits


Website for Squishy Circuits



We also had an art table, computers for coding, catapults, and the kids were able to revisit and tweak their projects from yesterday.

We wrapped up the day with Sumdog and blogging.  I can't wait to see what next week hold for us.  Be on the look out for more photos of our class!

Holidays Around the World

Yesterday, we kicked off our study of holidays around the world.  The kids made cute passports that they needed to board our classroom plane.  We then traveled over the Atlantic Ocean to our first stop Germany.  The children learned that The Brothers Grimm were from Germany.  We also read the story The Gingerbread Man.  The kids then made their own gingerbread man houses in teams.  They did an awesome job!! 

In addition to the gingerbread houses, the students did a STEM challenge where they needed to make a make a structure that would protect a gingerbread man from the falling fairy tale book.  The students learned how to roll recycled paper on the diagonal for a super strong building material and were broken into teams.  We had one gingerbread man come out of the experiment intact. 

Today, we went to Italy and sampled some yummy cookies from this beautiful country.