Edible Landfills

This week in our Carbon Footprint PBL, we learned about landfills through nonfiction texts. Students learned that all of our garbage is dumped into a landfill, giving us even more reason to reduce, reuse, and recycle! We were able to use nonfiction text features like diagrams and cross-sections to learn about the layers of a landfill. We ended our week by making our very own edible landfills! Below are pictures of the cross-sections we used to learn about the layers and make our own landfills.

Finally, after lots of hard work and fun learning, we got to eat our landfills! If only real landfills could be this tasty...

Native American Homes

To follow up on yesterday's blog, here are our finished homes! We are so proud of our hard work! Don't they look great?!

Eastern Woodlands- Chickee

 Great Basin- Hogan

 Plains- Tepee and Earth Lodge

 Southwest- Pueblo

Pacific Northwest- Plankhouse

A Terrific Tuesday

Well, today was quite an eventful day to start our week off! This morning we had a very special visitor... Dr. Patterson! Our principal came to visit us this morning to read us a story called The Day the Crayons Quit. This very entertaining story taught students the importance of being creative and becoming problem solvers, two very important skills to have in fourth grade! The kids really enjoyed our visit with Dr. Patterson and it was great to them interacting with someone who is so important in our school! Below are some pictures of Dr. Patterson reading aloud to the students: 

We ended our day today by getting hands-on with our social studies content! Students got to build a home from our five Native American cultural regions. The students worked very hard and the homes turned out GREAT! I am very impressed with the students' hard work and creativity! Thank you SO much to everyone who donated materials for this fun activity! I am very proud of the students; they worked cooperatively and efficiently the entire time. I heard many positive comments exchanged between groups such as, "Wow, that looks good!" or "You guys are doing a great job!" My students continue to impress me with their willingness to go above and beyond not only academically and behaviorally, but also in terms of their character! What sweet students I have! Below are some pictures of the students in action. Pictures of our finished products will be coming soon! 

End of Week One!

Well, week one is over, and what a wonderful week it's been! I feel so lucky to have those 20 precious students in my class! We had a busy week, but a fun week. Here are some of the things we've been doing to end our week...

In writing, we started our study of memoirs. I introduced the genre by allowing students to read a collection of memoirs and make their own observations about the similarities of the books. We made a class noticing chart to discuss the characteristics they noticed, and the students figured out on their own that the books were memoirs! How smart are they?!

We also continued to learn about the process skills scientists use by doing our own experiment! Students made predictions about how gummy bears would be affected by being placed in water, salt water, water with baking soda, and vinegar for 24 hours! Here are the results:

Students then had to make quantitative observations of the gummy bears by measuring the length of the gummy bears and comparing those measurements to the length of a normal gummy bear so we could discuss the change. 

Wow, we learned so much this week, but we had so much fun! I can't wait to see what next week holds for us! I'll leave you with a cute little video that just makes me smile. The students were watching a story being read to them on Tumblebooks and they were enjoying it so much, they decided to read along with the author! Enjoy!!

One Small Square- Part 2

Even though the rain kept us inside today, we still got to finish up our "One Small Square" activity. Our classroom just got a little dirty! Today in science we discussed qualitative observations and how to use our senses to make more detailed observations like scientists do. Then, students observed the same soil they dug up yesterday and recorded their observations in their Wonder Journals. They even got to use hand lenses like real scientists! The students' learning was evident in their observations. Compared to yesterday, today's observations were much more detailed! Students used all senses when observing today (except for taste!) whereas they only used sight yesterday. Below are some of the students' observations from Tuesday:
 

And here are some of our more detailed qualitative observations from today:

*These examples came from Brayson, Caroline, Lauren, and Boyce. Great job guys!!

One Small Square

Today was another fabulous day in school! We got to do a lot of learning and have a lot of fun today! In social studies we talked about the Land Bridge Theory, in reading we got to read about glyphs and make our own glyph key chains to communicate with each other, and in math we started practicing multiplication strategies. Things got a little messy in science, though! In pairs, students got to dig up "one small square" of soil to observe. Students were able to observe rocks, grass, clay, soil, and even worms! Today's activity was just a warm up for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will be learning about qualitative and quantitative observations. We will then observe our soil again and compare those observations to today's to see how our observations have improved and become more detailed. The kids definitely learned today that science may not always be clean, but it sure is fun! Below are some photos of the kids in action. Enjoy!!

First Day of School

Day 1- Success!

Wow, what a WONDERFUL day we had today! I am SO excited about my sweet new class! Today was filled with routines and procedures, but we DID get to a little learning today! The most exciting part was our science lesson. The students learned the importance of detailed observations and careful communication with our activity entitled "The Thing". In this activity, students had to recreate a structure I had built out of gum drops and toothpicks... but only ONE student in their group was allowed to actually see my creation! The rest of the students had to either relay the message, "buy" the materials, or construct the "thing". Once my creation was revealed and we compared the students' creation to mine, we discussed how scientists use these process skills in experiments. Below are some pictures of students constructing their "thing"! I can't wait to see what tomorrow will hold for us!