Our district has upgraded to the Campus version of Edublogs. All of our content has been transferred to our new URL, which is: http://blogs.goaj.org/mrshamman We’ll be posting there from now on. Thank you for visiting!
Moving day!
Oct 13
Mystery State Skype
Oct 10
In social studies we have been studying the history and geography of the United States. This year we have been learning about other states from the students who live there! We’ve been doing an activity called Mystery State. We Skype call a class in another state, and ask them questions about their state. Then they ask us questions about our state. We try not to make our clues too obvious, because we don’t want them to guess our state too quickly. At the end of the call, we each guess the other’s state.
We were introduced to Mystery State by Mr. Haney’s class, and now we Skype whenever we get the chance! Here is a Google Map with the states we have “visited” so far marked. We’d love to talk to a class in each of the fifty states before the end of the year.
Which states have you visited?
Which states would you like to learn more about?
We are enjoying our reading of Tuck Everlasting. It’s tempting to read ahead, but we want to stay on the schedule of the Global Read Aloud. One problem is that we have Fall Break the week of October 10-14, when we are supposed to be finishing the book. We will take a vote in class to see whether we want to finish reading it next week or wait until we get back. If we read ahead, we promise not to spoil the ending for everyone!
One thing we have noticed while we are reading is that Natalie Babbitt uses a lot of figurative language in her writing. We have been keeping track of similes, metaphors, idioms, hyperbole, and other forms of figurative language as we read. The figurative language makes the writing more colorful and interesting. This sentence is in Chapter 12: “The sky was a ragged blaze of red and pink and orange, and its double trembled on the surface of the pond like color spilled from a paintbox.” Isn’t that a great description of a sunset?
We illustrated some of our favorite figurative language, but our drawings are literal interpretations! For example, here is Jessie’s interpretation of the sentence about the sunset:
We made an Animoto video of some of our drawings. One of our favorite expressions to draw was “Jesse exploded.” Can you guess how we illustrated that one? It’s at the end of the video.
What is your favorite example of figurative language in Tuck Everlasting?
Avatars
Sep 16
This week we started the Student Blogging Challenge. The activities in the challenge are designed to teach us all about blogging and commenting on blogs.
One activity we really enjoyed is creating our avatars. Avatars are pictures that we use to represent our identities online. We each explored different avatar generators before we decided on one to save. It was challenging to create JPEG files of our avatars, but we worked together until we figured it out. If any of you have trouble with it, leave your question in a comment to this post and we’ll tell you how we did it!
Some of us chose to make avatars that sort of looked like us, while others made avatars that just looked cool! Here is a slideshow of our avatars.
Here are the three sites we used to create our avatars:
We’ll soon be starting on a couple of exciting projects. On September 19 we will begin the Global Readaloud. Students from all over the world will be reading the same book over the course of four weeks, and communicating about it using blogs, Edmodo, Skype, and Google Apps. Our class has already made a connection with Ms. Kim’s class in Seoul, South Korea, and we’re looking forward to connecting with others during the readaloud. The book we will be reading this year is Tuck Everlasting.
As we read we’ll be discussing the characters, plot, setting, theme, and narrative point of view of the book. It will be fun to communicate with others and get their insights as we read.
Another upcoming project is Edublogs’ Student Blogging Challenge. This challenge will help us improve our blogging and commenting skills. By the end of the challenge, some of us in the classroom may be ready to start our own personal blogs!
What do you know about the book Tuck Everlasting?
What do you hope to learn about as we participate in these two projects?
Calculating Photoperiods
Sep 2
Our class signed up for Journey North, a project which tracks wildlife migration and seasonal changes. One part of the project which sounds really exciting is the Mystery Class, “a global game of hide-and-seek”. Students track sunlight data in an attempt to locate ten mystery sites across the world; while doing that they learn the reasons why we have seasons and how the changes in seasons affect wildlife.
To prepare for Mystery Class, we started learning about photoperiods. We had already learned that the Greek root “photos” means “light”. A photoperiod is the period of time during the day when an organism is exposed to light.
We each were given a U.S. city to research. We looked up the sunrise and sunset data for our assigned city for August 31, 2011, then we calculated the photoperiod. Many of us had time to do some more research on our cities, and we enjoyed learning more about all those other places. This activity taught us geography, math, science, and research skills!
Guess which city that we researched had the longest photoperiod on August 31? You’ll find out if you watch our video! The song playing is called “Life in the Sun”, which we thought fit this video pretty well.
Why do you think that different cities had
different photoperiods?
What did you learn about the city you researched?
A Trip Back in Time
Aug 29
Last week we traveled back in time to visit Setauket, New York, in the year 1778. Well, we didn’t really travel through time, but we felt like we did!
We participated in a videoconference with the Ward Melville Heritage Organization in Long Island, New York. They presented a program called “Windows through Time: Journals of Revolutionary War Spies”. We learned about the Setauket Spy Ring, which operated undercover delivering important messages to help the Patriots during the American Revolution. Members of our class participated by pretending to be members of the Setauket community; some of us played ordinary townspeople and some of us were spies. It was really interesting to learn about all the ways the spies delivered their secret messages, all without the British soldiers suspecting a thing. The presenter made us feel like we were really there! Thank you, Anna!
Videoconferencing is a great way to visit places and make connections with people we wouldn’t be able to meet in person. This was our first videoconference of the year, and for many of us it was the first one we had ever experienced. We learned some tips for making a videoconference successful, and we took photos and drew pictures to illustrate our tips. Here is our Voicethread showing what we have learned so far:
We’re looking forward to doing lots more videoconferencing this year, and we will be adding to our Voicethread as we learn more.
Did you know there were Patriot spies during the American Revolution?
Have you ever participated in a videoconference?
In fifth grade, we study the geography and history of the United States in social studies. We’ve been learning about life in the colonies just before the American Revolution. We found a great way to experience what life was life back then through Mission US, an interactive, multimedia adventure.
Mrs. Hamman taught us some background information to explain the first mission of the game, which was called “For Crown or Colony?” After that we all got on our netbooks to explore the game. In the simulation, you play the part of Nathaniel Wheeler, a printer’s apprentice in Boston in 1770. Through the tasks Nathaniel has to perform, you get to meet real people who lived in Boston. You learn about the Loyalists and the Patriots and get to make decisions about who to trust and which side to support. The game introduced us to many primary sources, or actual documents and objects that were created during the time period. We’ve learned that when studying history looking for primary sources is important, so that you know the information you get is reliable.
We recorded our comments after playing the game:
Next week we’ll be video conferencing with a museum in Stony Brook, New York, to learn even more about the American Revolution!
Why do you think we should study history?
What historical periods would you like to study?
Welcome to our blog!
Aug 15
Welcome to a new school year and to our new class blog! We are a class of fifth grade students in Arizona. We’ll be telling you more about ourselves and our school as we write this blog.
This is the view outside our classroom
We started school last Tuesday, August 9. It has been very hot outside, but inside we kept cool as we explored the new technology we’ll be using in our class this year. On Tuesday we tried out our brand-new netbook cart. It’s a good thing the cart holds 32 netbooks, because there are 31 students in our class! We looked at some other class blogs and websites and planned what we’d like ours to include. We also used our new Smartboard to play an online Jeopardy game.
On Wednesday we learned how to use an iPod touch. We’re lucky to have eight iPods which we’ll take turns using this year. We explored a few of the educational songs and apps on the iPods; it looks like Stack the States is going to be a class favorite!
On Thursday we used the Smartboard to look at posts on several different class blogs. We paid special attention to the comments sections and we started a conversation about what makes a good comment. We noticed that the best comments were polite, thoughtful, and used proper spelling and grammar. Blogging is a new experience for all of us this year, so it’s a good thing there are so many great class blogs out there to teach us more about it! We will start writing our own comments next week.
On Friday we brainstormed what to write about in our first blog post. We talked about all the new things we learned and did this week. Some people wanted to write about the activities and games we played in class, and some wanted to talk about our new choices in the school cafeteria. After a vote, we decided to focus on the technology we used this week.
At the end of the day on Friday we filled out a survey on the netbooks. One of the questions was: “What are three words that describe your first week of fifth grade?” Mrs. Hamman took all of the responses and pasted them into a Wordle. A Wordle creates a “word cloud” from text, with the words used the most often appearing largest. Here is our first week of school Wordle:
It looks like our most commonly used word to describe our first week was “fun”!
What was your favorite thing about our first week of school?
What kinds of technology help you to learn?
