Newsletter: Thursday, May 12

Another motion experiment...

For this motion experiment we rolled a cricket ball on different surfaces to
see how far it would travel on each. To ensure the ball was given the same amount of force
for each trial we created a ramp out of a picture book and a board eraser. 

The kids kept track of the data in their science journals. Again, we used the median value
for each data set to filter out any crazy results. 

In this pic you can see the table we created to show our results. The kids worked to make
sense of this data and came to the conclusion that surfaces that were both hard and smooth seemed
to allow the ball to roll the furthest. They thought this was because there was nothing to
slow it down (like clumps of grass, pieces of carpeting, etc).

                    Doubling numbers in math...

We read a book about a girl who, receiving payment for a good deed,  makes a deal with the
Raja to give her and her people one grain of rice and then double it each following day for a month. The
 king thought this deal would be in his favor. We investigated to find out.

The kids went to work doubling the numbers again and again. It was a great
 way to revisit work we have done this year with addition and reading large numbers.

The numbers quickly grew into the thousands and eventually into the millions. It was
definitely not a good deal for the greedy Raja who was withholding rice during a famine.

          Mother Day cards...

I hope everyone enjoyed the cards the kids brought home for their mothers this past weekend.
We modeled them after a book we had read called I Love it When You Smile.

It took us the better part of an entire morning to read the book, discuss ideas, draft our
cards, publish them onto the card stock, trace with pens, then paint or color. They were
proud to show off what they created for their classmates.

Making these cards reminded me of the need to bring more art into our classroom engagements.
This could easily be a part of our daily Explorations. Working with Mrs. Watkins one day a week
is not nearly enough time for those who love exploring different materials.

              Typing like mad...

I have not photos of this but we have been learning to navigate a word document as we type our most recent stories. This if providing all sorts of opportunity to discuss the keyboard and different features of a typed document. Today we learned how to access our word counts and then used subtraction to figure out how many words each of us typed in forty-five minutes. We ranged from 11 - 255. The kids are becoming more and more comfortable finding each letter. We also learned there seems to be a direct relationship between the number of words typed and amount of time spent typing versus talking. Go figure!