KIBO Robots!

We studied robots and programming. We started by creating a programming language to guide a student "robot" though a maze.

We studied electronics with Little Bits.

And, we used two robot sets called KIBO. These robots use wooden blocks you connect to create a program for the robot to follow.

Our KIBO kits were purchased by the PTO through a generous grant from the Watertown Community Foundation. Thank you!

Some end-of-year videos

We read a number of books by Oliver Jeffers. One of his books, The Great Paper Caper, has a bear who makes paper airplanes. To wrap up our author study, we all made paper airplanes!

Field day was a lot of fun!

Notes from our communications managers

Science Update: Geology and changes to the Earth

We have been studying a lot about changes to the Earth. We made a chart of different events that make changes at very different rates. Some things happen very quickly, and others happen very slowly. Many changes to the Earth are very, very, very, very, very, very slow. They happen over millions of years, and you can't see that they are happening, but we can find evidence they have occurred.

We also set up our giant stream table in the past few weeks, and have been using it to look at how water can change the land. We noticed that after a flood, the path of the river had changed. We also noticed that the river did a lot of eroding, and it pulled a lot of sand downstream toward the ocean.

Folk Tale Elements

We have been reading and discussing a lot of folk tales over the last few weeks. We made a chart of all the common elements you see across all folk tales and most folk tales. We then illustrated these characteristics.

Then, we picked a few elements to focus on, and analyzed a folk tale to see if they were present. We looked at Gerald McDermott's retelling of Zomo, a folk tale from West Africa. Everyone looked to see if this story had talking animals, the rule of 3, and a lesson or moral. Then, after discussing it with a partner and planning out what they were going to say, students wrote a page of analysis, supporting their argument with specific examples from the text.

The king's foot

When the royal carpenters received a message from the king to make him a new bed, nobody expected to end up in the dungeon. However, when the beds arrived at the castle, there was a problem. A big problem. The king couldn't fit into any of them. They were all too small!

How did this happen? The royal mathematician investigated and found that the carpenters had indeed followed the king's exact specifications. They made beds that were 7 feet long and 4 feet wide, just as the king had measured with his own feet. The problem was that the carpenters all had smaller feet than the king!

After an intense discussion, the royal mathematicians came up with a few suggestions to prevent the problem from happening again:

- get only carpenters whose feet are the same size as the king

- create a tool the same size as the king's foot

- have the king measure all the pieces of wood in the future

We decided the easiest solution was to create a new tool: the kings foot. It would be a ruler, just like he was..

Weekly Snapshot: 2/12 - 2/16

Reader's Workshop
We thought a lot about dialogue this week. Authors use dialogue to make their stories more interesting to read, and to show you what different characters are saying. Dialogue is a great way to move a story along without having to just tell your reader everything that is happening. There are several important conventions we use to show dialogue, and we looked closely at these this week.

Writer's Workshop
We started to think about the play we will perform later this spring!

We worked on our own versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We were careful to include dialogue in our stories, and to choose interesting words to use to indicate who is saying what, and how they are saying it.

Math
Monday was the 100th day of school! We did many math activities to celebrate, including taking 100 steps down the hallway to see how far we would go!

We continued to work with multiplication of 2's, 5's, and 10's. We worked on word problems that require multiplication or skip counting. Here is one we tried:
Jake has 7 jars. Each jar has 5 pickles in it. How many more jars does he need to have 45 pickles in all?

You can practice skip counting by these numbers at home! Have your little sister or your dad or your grandmother pick a number you should start on, then skip count from there!

Science
We constructed and tested flood protection solutions that would save our houses from a stream table flood. After we tested, we identified strengths and weaknesses (we call them plusses and deltas), then wrote about what happened with our strategy.

We also tested solutions to prevent a stream from eroding the land. Each group could use just 1 material. We had: sticks, rocks, a clay wall, a cardboard wall, and window mesh.

Social Studies
Ms. Notaro came in to talk with our class about the "zones of regulation." What are the zones? Each zone represents and energy level and emotional state that you might have, from low-energy blue to very high red. Have your student explain what the different zones are, and some strategies to move back to green.

News and Other Information
Our morning meeting questions:
- What is your favorite game?
- How do you show kindness?
- What is a talent you have?
- What are you doing for vacation?