Children Around the World

Remember back in September, we used the book My Librarian is a Camel to work on making observations and asking questions?

The Washington Post shared an article this week titled How classrooms look around the world - in 15 amazing photographs. It's pretty cool to see what other students experience!

Another post from the New York Times online magazine that we will use is this one, Rise and Shine: What kids around the world eat for breakfast.

What other things do you wonder about children in other countries?

What a zoo!

We have started to dig in to our new project, creating a scale model of a zoo complete with animals and detailed enclosures.

Here are the websites we talked about for your research. Click on the hyperlink below the image for direct access to each site.

San Diego Zoo

National Geographic Kids ~ Animals

Animal Fact Guide

A-Z Animals 

Endangered Species Fact Sheets

Enchanted Learning

(You will not have access to everything on this site because it requires a subscription.)

Mini-Project: Get Your Recycle On!

So... we were going to do a bit of research about recycling and create posters that encouraged others to recycle but the kids had other plans! The idea grew into a mini-project that took about a week to complete. Some did make posters but others created Boards in Discovery Education's Board Builder, others created technology projects, and we even had a short play. Some of the projects are featured below:

MA, LM and LS created this Prezi about recycling as a part of our mini-project.



And here's another from JW, BS and KM:


And another from GT and DG:

Recycling Facts

http://www.timeforkids.com/news/earth-day/87036
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/swfa/kidspage/trivia.html
http://www.benefits-of-recycling.com/interestingrecyclingfacts/
http://www.recycleguys.org/

Valentine Box Ideas

Hi Kids!
I'm sorry that we missed out on the rest of last week and didn't get a chance to make our castles for Valentine's Day. :( I hope that you still want to make them and wanted to share some ideas to give you a little inspiration...
:)Ms. Gannon

Math Teacher or Pirate?

I couldn't resist... :)

The BFG

We've been reading one of my very favorite books, The BFG by Roald Dahl. I can't say that I love the movie (the book is ALWAYS better in my opinion) but the kids really enjoy seeing the characters come to life. Here's the whole movie on YouTube...

2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi

The Winter Olympics begin soon so these are some links we'll use in the classroom to 

help us learn more about the games, the history behind them, the Olympians, the countries they represent and the location of the games this month. Go USA!

Here's the main website for the Olympics... olympic.org
There you can find schedules, information about athletes, countries that participate and more!



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"The 2014 Winter Olympics will take place in Sochi, Russia, from February 7 through February 23. Events are divided into 14 sports—15 if skeleton is counted as a separate sport from bobsleigh. (Here, we’re counting them as a single sport.) Some sports have multiple disciplines—men’s and women’s competitions, relay competitions, and races of different distances. Each discipline will have three medalists—gold, silver, and bronze." ~ from National Geographic Education

For information about the sports played in the winter games, check out Sports of the 2014 Winter Olympics on National Geographic Education.

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From NBCLearn:

Science and Engineering of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
This 10-part video series, produced by NBC Learn and NBC Sports, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, explores the science, technology, engineering and math of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

Science of the Olympic Winter Games
This original video collection explores the physics, biology, chemistry, and math behind the Olympic Winter Games.

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http://cybraryman.com/olympics.html

This is a great collection of things you might want to know about the Game as well as teaching materials from Cybraryman, former teacher Jerry Blumengarten.

Tangrams = Fun with Geometry

We did some work last week with tangrams, as a part of our study of geometry. Tangrams are often used to tell stories so after much discussion about the math behind the polygons, we created some characters and things from the tangrams to be used as a part of some writing this week. We posted some videos on our Twitter page but I wanted to share them here as well for easy access...

Welcome to the 2013-14 School Year!

It is such an honor to work with your child this year and I look forward to working with you to ensure his/her success. In case you couldn't join us for Parent Night recently, you can view our slide show here. This will not provide all of the same information, of course, so if you find you'd like clarification about anything or if it brings up any questions, feel free to contact me.