A Little About Our Book Buddy Time

Here you will find some photos of our book buddies.  Some of the pairs have added captions to help you understand our reading workshop a little better.  Keep checking back for more updates and to hear from all of the groups!

We were reading the Knight at Dawn.  Then we got done with the book.  So now we are reading Twister on Tuesday.  It is like exploration.

  

Katherine & I are reading a book called Frindle.  It is about a boy named Nick Allen who re-names a pen, frindle.  Lucy & I are in the middle of the book where frindle has started to become a real word.  

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We are reading the book Night of the New Magicians.  We sit knee to knee eye to eye.  Noa asks Jaylen questions in the book.  Noa helps Jaylen with words.  Noa and Jaylen love the book.

Our group, the AWESOME authors are reading IVY and BEAN books. When we read book 3 we were fascinated.  These are the rules:  knee to knee, eye to eye.  ON TOPIC.  Self monitor your talking.  Take turns.  Those are the most important rules in book buddies.  We love to read!

          

Our name is the Awesome Owls.  Our book's name is the Guardians of Ga'Hoole.  We like our group name because it's named after our book. We are the only group of three.  The main character is Soren.

Flicker the Flame Presentation

We were visited by Flicker the Flame and his friend, Ellen, from the gas company.  They came to teach us about natural gas:  What it smells like, how to avoid it, and how we use it. 

We were able to smell what natural gas smells like.  P.S. it smells terrible!

We also have a really nice group picture with Flicker that we'll hang up in our room.  Be sure to take a look next time you're visiting our classroom!

Ancient Greece Explorers

We're studying ancient Greece and we're having a great time!  One thing that all of us REALLY enjoyed was trying on togas and eating Greek food.  -Maddie

We got to try on togas.

We tasted some food from ancient Greece!

We tasted black and green olives, grapes, wheat bread, goat cheese, olive oil, and apples.  

We recognized some of the food.

Others, we weren't so sure about.

Ms. Bindas picked cards to choose who would be the "man" of the family to shop at the agora for the food.  The agora was the market in ancient Greece where mainly men bartered for food for their family. 

We watched a video about the Parthenon that showed the present-day reconstruction researchers are doing.  It's amazing to think that the ancient Greeks constructed such amazing temples without modern day technology.   Here's a few of our Parthenon sketches we did with Ms. Mary Lou in art:

Building Polygons

We've been investigating polygons.  Polygons are two-dimensional shapes like a triangle, square, hexagon, and octagon.  Our challenge was to find out which polygon would be the strongest, after building them all with strips of paper for the sides and brads for the vertices.  Building the polygons was a challenge in itself!  We figured out that the triangle was the strongest shape because it didn't really wobble around and it didn't lose its shape.

Luke and Tyler's hexagon

Ja'Naizha is making her triangle

Mekhi is figuring out how to make the heptagon - the 7-sided polygon!

Kaitlyn and Nikki are using teamwork to make different shapes!

Building the polygons was kind of hard but it helped us learn a lot about building and being architects.  Check back soon to see how we used what we learned about strong polygons to design and build three-dimensional structures like real architects.

Virginia Wildlife Center Field Trip

We thank Mrs. Mitchell for making this video of our field trip to the Va Wildlife Center.  You will see Ms. Bindas' class, turtles, different types of birds, and a snake named Cornelius.  Buttercup the Vulture was our favorite animal, because it played peak-a-boo with us!

 Click the link to enjoy this wonderful slideshow!

http://smilebox.com/play/4d7a4d334f5467334e4442384e7a55334f5455774d6a553d0d0a&sb=1

Exploring the Explorers

Christopher Columbus is the explorer we started researching first.  We looked through books for information about Columbus' voyage.  We examined an entry from the log he kept during his journeys. Ms. Bindas thought it would be cool if we tried to write a song to remember Christopher Columbus.  Once we gathered plenty of IMPORTANT FACTS about him, we began to think about how we could turn these facts into a song.  First, we thought of a rhythm for our song.  We decided on "The Farmer and the Dell".  Then, we took our facts and put them into the rhythm of "The Farmer and the Dell".  After we finished, we read over the song to make sure that it sounded okay.  We thought it was good, so we practiced it together.  This is how it went:

To the tune of "The Farmer and the Dell"

Columbus sailed for Spain,

Columbus sailed for Spain,

He was from Italy, but he sailed for Spain.

He got permission,

From the King and Queen,

To find a western route to the Indies.

He set to sea,

With ninety men,

On the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

He was trying to get to the Indies,

By sailing west,

But landed in San Salvador by mistake.

Columbus didn't know,

He hadn't reached the Indies,

So he called the people there Indians.

- Written by Room 22.

Deciding On Pools

A couple weeks  ago  our class made pools for our towns. Do you want to know how we built our pool designs? We'll  tell you! First Miss Payne gave us tiles so we could find all the possible designs for our pool. After we found all the possible designs we made a number table in our math journals. Once the table was done we got out  our graph paper, and started to make our pool designs. Once they were complete we shared them in math workshop.

Check out Luke's work below:

      

This is Paige's pool design, the 2x18.

This is Nikki's pool design, the 3x12.

Around the pools we made non-slip walkways for the kids to be safe. We tried to find the pool design that had the cheapest walkway by counting by 4's because each non-slip tile was $4.00. The cheapest pool was the 6x6. Even though it's the cheapest, do you think the 6x6 would be the best pool design? Or would another be better? Look up at the pictures that 2 of our friends made. (The 6x6 is a square.) Leave any comments below!


By: Sofie & Nikki