States of Matter

I am blessed to work at a school that has great traditions.  One of which is 50's day.  Typically, we celebrate this the last day with students before Spring Break.  This year, we celebrated the Friday after due to a scheduling conflict.  Our fifth graders perform dances in the morning assembly and in the afternoon we have a live band, hula hoop and bubble gum blowing contests, and each grade dances.  It is a ton of fun!

This week, our learnt focused on this school wide event as well as finishing up loose ends.  During our writing time, we wrote directions for how to make a root beer float.

It is fun to process with the class and get them to think through the fact that we actually have to buy and gather the ingredients.  It was also neat to see their background knowledge of all our cooking experiences come to life when I asked them what they thought the ingredients would be.  They instantly named sugar.  We had great discussions throughout the week leading up to us making the root beer floats for snack on Friday.

 

My science unit for second and third quarter is solids and liquids.  We wrapped up the unit on Friday with our special snack.  We talked about the ingredients and the state of matter they represented.  

Earlier in the week, we listened to non-fiction texts about matter and acted out the three states of matter with our bodies before making a foldable with Cheerios.

 

When we acted out the states of matter, we were close together for a solid, some space for liquids, and even more room for gases.

 

We also finished up working on consonant diagraph sh and th.  I have many children who substitute the /f/ sound for th.  As we wrote words, I had children identify where the sound could be found in the word.  Depending on our time, either I wrote the word or they helped.

 

We will work more with the consonant diagraph th this weeks as it holds more opportunities for learning for this group of children.

My school also celebrates its 50th anniversary in May. Each grade level is working on a project for a time capsule to be buried and dug up in twenty five years at the 75th anniversary.  Our class worked on a class book of letters.  When I introduced this project, I talked about how it was a birthday present for a Monroe.  My class has lots of questions about how long it would be before we opened it. When I told them, they would be my age on Monroe's 75th anniversary, I shocked them!  We also talked about how kindergarten had changed throughout the years.  We have been reading Ramona the Pest during our quiet time and I referenced the story and how Ramona only goes to kindergarten for half day.  I asked them to think about things that make our school (and class) special.  Some of them understood that and it shows in their letters.  I loved the final outcome.