Sock Day

Look at all of these crazy socks!

Birmingham Museum of Art

Today we took a field trip to The Birmingham Museum of Art.  This trip provided the students with a wonderful learning experience that went along wonderfully with our prehistoric indian and culture units.  The students followed the Moccasin Trail in the museum and saw a lot of Indian artifacts.  Once we completed our Native American tour we then took a self-guided tour and saw pieces from Africa, India, China, Japan, and Korea.  Ask your child about something he/she learned.
We were not allowed to have cameras inside the museum, so I had to snap a few pictures during lunch.

Simile City

We learned that similes can help to improve our writing by making our stories come alive to our readers.  We learned that similes compare two things using the words like or as.

Where'd The Water Go?

This week we conducted a science experiment.  I had to cups, one labeled A and one labeled B.  I showed the students that both cups were empty and I then poured water into both cups.  I asked for an assistant to come up front and I then poured one of the cups of water over her head.  BUT...no water came out of cup A.  Where did the water go???  

I posed a question to the students and they then formed their hypothesis as to what they thought happened to the water.  The most common hypothesis I received was that there was a paper towel in the bottom of the cup.

 Once we discussed a few of the students hypotheses I then passed the cup around.  They saw that inside was a diaper that has a substance that soaks up liquid.  The substance inside turns into gel-like crystals when it gets wet.  They were so intrigued by this!

Student of the Week

101 - 200 Bingo

During our in-class math club time this week, students paired up to play 101 - 200 Bingo.  

Directions:  Each student begins with a 1 that stays in the hundreds place.

Students draw 2 digit cards and one tens card.

Students arrange their 2 digit cards in the ones and tens place along with their one to form a 3-digit number.

Students then add or subtract the value of their tens card.

Students shade that value on the 101-200 bingo.

The goal is to get 5 in a row.

War Eagle

Mrs. Farris made these precious cupcakes for our Faculty Tailgate Pig-Out on Friday.

Happy Birthday, Lauren!

JLT

 Friday was a HUGE day at our school.  We elected our JLT members and found out who made Science Club, Center Stage, and Grease-A School Version.  For JLT we had 6 candidates from our classroom and they each did a great job.

Our winners that will be representing our class this year are SMITH and LAUREN.  Congratulations!

JLT/Student Council

Student Council has a new name at Leon Sheffield this year.  This year Student Council will be referred to as the Junior Leadership Team.  We have several students interested in being a part of JLT.  They have brought in some nice posters to hang in our classroom as they campaign for the position of JLT classroom representative.  Each student running will give their speech Friday morning and then we will vote for the two students that will represent our classroom this year.

Water, Water

We finally conducted our first science experiment of the year.  Each science experiment we conduct has 5 components, they are:  question, hypothesis, observations, conclusion, and new question.  The question posed to the students was "How much of the Earth is made up of land?  How much of the Earth is made up of water?"  We discussed how we would state our hypothesis, or prediction, using percentages and how percentages must add up to be 100%.  We had a lot of different guesses about how much water is on the Earth.
Once we stated our hypotheses we began working on our observations.  Students would place their hands (with their fingers spread wide) on a spinning globe.

The globe would stop spinning once their hands landed on it and they would then tell us what each of their fingers was touching, land or water.  We created a tally chart to keep track of our results.

Once we completed our tally chart we discussed how there is definitely more water than land.  We also talked about how our results were not completely accurate so we discussed the actual amounts of water and land on Earth.

This is an example of one of the students' science notebook entries for Water, Water.

Happy Birthday, Hunter!

Hunter celebrated his birthday on Monday!

Multiples

This week in math we have learned about multiples and factors as we have prepared to take our big multiplication test on Friday!
We practiced learning our multiples by shading them on a hundreds chart.

Student of the Week

Last week's student of the week was Mackenzi.

 This week's student of the week is Lauren.

We have enjoyed learning about each of these girls!

Think Link

We have completed both Think Link tests.  Each student worked hard to get theirs completed and to do their best.  Here's a picture of a few of them thinking hard about their test!

The Year's First Robotics Meeting

I am one of the robotics sponsors for Leon Sheffield.  This team is made-up of 16 students that are selected after completing an information/technology based test.  In robotics students are able to use their creativity to design and construct a robot and then program it to complete a given task.
Our first few meetings are held to set-up our kits.  This takes a LOT of time because the pieces get all mixed up throughout the year during our construction time.  However, it is important for students to begin with a complete kit when robotics starts.  Today we met for an hour and each student worked so hard to get their kits put together.

The group pictured below was the "winning" group.  They were the only group to get an entire kit completely put together today!  Way to go, guys!!

Culture Project Research

We finally got a chance to go to the computer lab to work on our culture projects.  We practiced creating a Power Point slide and inserting pictures from files into the slide.  The students also got a chance to do a little researching AND they FINALLY go to use their flash drives.  They were sooooo excited!!!

Something for the hallway

Open House was Monday and I frantically realized just a few short hours beforehand that our class didn't have anything we created in class hanging in the hallway.  So....we quickly threw together a self-portrait to which we will add an acrostic poem about ourselves, a paragraph about our expectations for the school year, and a few other interesting facts!  Here are a few pictures of the students working on their self-portraits.

Turbidity Guides

Today was had our first science notebook entry.  We created a turbidity guide.  Turbidity is the clarity of water.  We used this guide to illustrate the difference in transparent, translucent, and opaque water.  We all decided we would prefer transparent water!