Meeting of the Athenian Assembly

Last week we reenacted a meeting of the Assembly in Athens. Ancient Athens was a direct democracy, which means the citizens had to vote to make decisions. Don't be fooled! In order to vote you had to be:

• Free (not a slave)
• A MAN! (Girls in our class were not too happy about this.)

The Assembly met on Friday to decide whether the boy who cried wolf was innocent or guilty. 

The Crime: A shepherd boy was watching sheep in Athens when he called out two times to the villagers to help him with a wolf. But there really wasn't any wolf and he laughed when they came to help. The last time he called there really was a wolf but the villagers didn't come to help him because he had already lied to them two times. All of the sheep were killed by the wolf. Is the boy guilty or innocent?

We made replicas of the disks that Athenian men used to cast their votes. The disk with the hole meant "innocent" and the disk with the bar through the center meant "guilty." When the votes were cast by all of the members of our class, the boy was found innocent! However, when the votes were cast by the true "citizens" of Athens (the free men) it was a tie!

 

Our homemade Guilty and Not Guilty Athenian voting disks

Head for the Agora!

If you weren't here today for our Greek Bread Luncheon, #1) You missed out on tasting some scrumptious Greek barley bread but #2) We wouldn't want you to completely miss out so here's a video of our agora experience yesterday. (Be sure to check out the Greek letters we used to make our agora stall signs!)

The Feasting Yeast

We are doing an interesting experiment to find out what is a feast for yeast? Yeast doesn't make its own food, so it has to consume food from somewhere...but where?

Who knows which ingredient will activate the yeast? Will it be flour, salt, olive oil, or honey (sugar)? We are mixing yeast and one of the other ingredients and adding warm water to see which one activates the yeast...OR you could say gives the yeast a feast! 

Each group got one ingredient to mix with the yeast and water in a cup

We made observations then let the cups sit overnight 

The yeast and the sugar started looking like oatmeal! It was a tannish color and had big white and yellow bubbles. The next morning it smelled like wine and looked kind of like mold. We all thought the sugar must have been the feast the yeast was looking for!

The yeast and sugar CLOSE-UP...yikes!

Experts in Our Midst

This is our Expert Wall. When someone becomes an "Expert" at one of these writing characteristics it means they have mastered it and can help their classmates. If you find yourself stuck during Writing Workshop - maybe you can't figure out a grabber lead for your story, you want to add some dialogue, or you realize you're starting all of your sentences the same way - you find one of these Experts to help you!

Since we're all learners in this classroom, that means we're also all teachers (not just Miss Payne!).

Gargantuan Gummy Bears

Macy, Ginger, and Jamaine are weighing their gummy bear and seeing how much grams their gummy bear is. They want to make sure that each side is equal!

Max is also weighing his gummy bear. In the left bucket there is 3 grams in it and in the right bucket there is 1 gummy bear. It looks like it is even. Now he is ready for the next task with his buddies!

Henry is now weighing how much his gummy bear. He is almost finished weighing his bear. There is 3 grams in his bucket. Henry is ready for the next step!

Now every group fills there cups with water. 2 cups get filled with cold water and the other cup gets filled with warm water. Each group gets 3 pieces of tape and writes the label on it so they don't get mixed up. Then everyone makes their hypotheses...what they think is going to happen!

Every group gets 3 gummy bears and then they drop 1 gummy bear in each cup. What is going to happen in 4 hours?

Rhyane is making his hypotheses. He is talking to his group to see what THEY think is going to happen. After 4 hours we looked inside our cups and found out the results. Here are the observations we made:

The bear in the cold water expanded to 2 times it's normal size. It feels squishy and slimy like jello!  The bear in the warm water dissolved! A little bit of the gummy bear is left with the color fading around it. the gummy bear in the salty water got bigger than it's normal size but not as big as the bear in the cold water. Small salt crystals or bubbles were all around the bear.

A real, live....

BOOK CLUB MEETING! Listen in on Andy, Lainey, Ella, and Mallory as they meet to discuss their Book Club book, Spiderwick Chronicles Book One: The Field Guide.

The Coolest Salt, Egg Project Ever!!!!

Ingredients for salt  project:

We had fun dropping the egg in water and watching it bounce at the bottom of the glass.

 

What we did first was watch our awesome teacher Ms. Payne show us what to do. Then we were split up into groups of 4. We all got to do 1 or 2 parts. When the plain water was in, the egg went to the bottom. When the salt water was in it was at the top of the water. Try it at your house now!!