Behind the Scenes with 5M 9/22-9/26

     This week was a lot of fun! We watched a 30 minute film called "Binta and the Great Idea" to learn about social justice issues. Although it was in a different language, there were sub titles at the bottom so that we could understand what the characters were saying. As we watched the movie, we passed notes to our reading partners saying questions, comments and social justice issues that are involved in the film.

     We are also starting a new read aloud book called "Crash" which is written by Jerry Spinelli. So far, we have read two chapters of it. It is about a boy named John Coogan. (Everybody calls him Crash). The first two chapters talked about a flashback of when he first met his new neighbor, Penn Webb.

     On Thursday, we met with our kindergarten learning buddies. We shared a poem that we wrote and read it to them and they read us a poem that they wrote for us.

      In Science, we are learning about force and motion. We also conducted experiments using spheres of different sizes, a ramp and a runway. We are talking about momentum, potential energy, and kinetic energy as well. We tested experiments with corks too. In this experiment, we made a small hill with a pencil under a ramp. Then, we placed the cork on the 30 centimeter mark. We tested what sphere and release point pushed the cork over the hill. 

    Today the Clayton High school band and Cheerleaders came to get up pepped up for Homecoming this weekend.  All of the students at Glenridge sat on the blacktop and the band circled around us while the cheerleaders did their routines in the front.  It was a lot of fun to hear the music and watch the cheerleaders dance.  Hopefully Clayton can win this weekend!

 

                We can't wait until next week.

                                                                            Blogger: Sonia and Jennifer

"Binta and the Great Idea"

    We watched a short film today in class.  The film is titled "Binta and the Great Idea" and was nominated for an academy award in 2007.  It is a story of a young African girl named Binta who is allowed to attend school and the story of Binta's cousin, Soda, who is not allowed by her father to attend school.  Binta develops an idea to try to persuade Soda's father to send Soda to school.

    We used this film to practice noticing and identifying when social injustices are present.  As the students watched they had silent conversations with their partners through note passing.  Their conversations were guided by the following questions:
     What seems fair?  What seems unfair?  What pressures are put on the characters and how do they respond?  What does the filmmaker want us to feel while watching this film and why?

    These questions led us to discuss the social issues of power, education, family, and gender.   We talked about the pressures each of the characters might have faced to try to understand their actions.  We reflected on our own lives and the privileges we have every day that we might take for granted like the ability to go to school every day and have our own meals. 

    This was a powerful film that evoked such deep conversations.  I hope you have an opportunity to watch and talk with your child about it!

"Binta and the Great Idea" Film

Abbreviated Behind the Scenes with 5M 9/15-9/19

      This week we did lots of things. In Science, we did an activity with a sphere, a inclined plane (a ramp), and a long, thick black tube. We had to see which ball went the farthest in 2 seconds. It turns out that the medium sized ball went the farthest most of the time. We also made a chart(graph) for the project.

   This week in Music, we auditioned for the Pinocchio play and it was fun and stiff competition.     

Reporters: John and Jenna

Behind the Scenes with 5M 9/8-9/12

           In math we are getting used to our math classrooms (Well most of us). It is really fun!!  We like learning and talking about multiplication and division strategies.

In reading we are still reading Seedfolks.  We are learning more about how the different characters are all coming together because of the community garden.  

We continued working on poetry this week.  We had a fun challenge to take an ordinary object and write about it in a way that makes it come alive.  We really got to stretch the creative part of our brain.  In Science we started talking about potential and kinetic energy.

African Dancing

  Today we finished our African Dance. We had a lot of fun doing it! Some parents showed up to see us dance! We started at the beginning of this week and ended today. This was our last year doing it. Many of us started in kindergarten and it got more advanced each year. We really enjoyed doing it!

    The Desk Fairy

    This morning a lot of people got a little note from the Desk Fairy! The Desk Fairy leaves us notes if our desks are very organized.  We get a treat and today we got extra recess!  We get 25 minutes of recess from 2:15 to 2:40!  This also gives time for other students to organize and clean their desk and get a teacher’s help if they need it.  It was a good reminder to find good organization strategies that work for us and to use them.

Electronics celebration

        Today we have an electronics celebration so we get to bring our Ipads, phones, etc. We earned it by spelling out the word ‘teamwork’.  In order to get letters to spell out the word, we needed to be good and get compliments by other teachers in the school! We get to play on our electronic for the last 30 minutes of the school day.  Happy Friday!

Reporters: Aden and Sarah

Behind the Scenes with 5M

This week fifth grade focused on claymo and teamwork.  We had our first claymo lesson and we led it!!!!  Claymo is really fun, we got to make a tower out of spaghetti, string, a marshmallow, and tape.  Our goal was to build the tallest freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top.  Some were successful and some were not but we all had great teamwork!

An academic highlight from this week was in Science. We got to experiment more with pendulums. We recorded data about how many times the pendulums swung. The different variables changed how many times it swung and here are some examples of the variables: length of the string, mass of the bob, and time.

 

We get to have a kindergarten learning buddies this year and we just found out who they are today! We will get to read with them, perform science experiments with them, and help them with their math skills.  We cannot wait to get to get to be with our learning buddies again.  This week was really filled with many leadership opportunities.

Reporters: Joshua and Sophia

Behind the Scenes with 5M

     This week was a busy week even though it was a short week.  Some highlights from this week were Boggle, starting to read Seedfolks, our first Art class, and the CLAYMO retreat.

    At the beginning of our literacy time in the afternoon, we play boggle as a way to calm down and get our minds focused again on academics. Seedfolks is our read aloud book that we began reading this week.  It’s a book told from many different characters’ perspectives.  

          On Tuesday we had art and learned how to make art out of ink and a straw, or cover the paper in water and dot the paper with ink, it would make an ink mark and bleed across the paper.

We learned about part of the homework policy for 5th grade.  Ms. McMillion told us what the missed homework sheet is and what to do with it.

          On Wednesday in math we learned how to estimate the answer to a division using compatible numbers.  We also learned how to estimate and round when doing multiplication.

We had Spanish and PE on Wednesday. In Spanish we played games and in PE we played give and receive.

In science, we built pendulums.  We will be experimenting with these pendulums to see what affects their movement and speed.  

          Thursday we had our field trip to the claymo retreat. We went to Tilles park and the Center of Clayton.   When we were there we learned our partners and our groups. We were gone for the whole day.  We did some stations with our claymo partners, including making our lanyards. One station was decorating flower pots.  At the Clayton center we played games and got letters from our parents. We practiced for the first claymo group. We had fun. We made a marshmallow tower challenge, which was our first claymo lesson that will teach. We watched videos from kid president. 

 Reporters: Brooke and Abby

CLAYMO Retreat

     Today we went to Tilles Park and the Clayton Center for the Claymo Retreat. We learned how to be a good Claymo leader. We did a lot of fun things such as playing kickball, painting pots, meeting and getting to know our partners, and reading letters from our parents. We also had a lanyard ceremony after that. At the end, we watched a video by Kid President. The purpose of this field trip was to learn how to be a leader and we did activaties to help us understand that and how to act in difficult situations. In conclusion, we learned to be a thoughtful, kind, and a reliable Claymo leader.

We are all looking forward to a great year!

   TOday during the CLAYMO Retreat one of the activities we participated in was the marshmallow tower challenge. And preparing for the first CLAYMO lesson. The challenge was to build the tallest possible structure with tape, spaghetti, string, and the marshmallow. The rules was that you got only ten minutes to complete the challenge and you immediately had to let go and it had to stand up on its own to let it qualify. This activity we will be doing for our first CLAYMO lesson. But this time to complete this challenge the younger groups will have eighteen minutes to complete this challenge and will be working in bigger groups than just partners. After 18 minutes everyone will let go and we will discuss how you worked together and how you felt and also who won.

       

    Today we also made the lanyards with our names and decorated it to represent us and our personality!It was also a good time to learn more about our new partners! It was pretty fun! After words we learned how to be good CLAYMO leaders. we stat in a circle and we asked some questions and we learned from each other. :)

 

     After Tilles park and we went to the Clayton center.  Kickball was one of the two activities we did for recess at the center.  We played it were when the kicking team got 3 outs,  they switched to the outfield. Kickball was a very good team building activity!  Thats what we did in kickball!!!

     One of the other recess activities was a dance party.  At the dance party there were hula hoops, songs and dancing. Everyone took off their shoes and danced to Happy, The Macarana and YMCA. The boys went in a line and did the train. Some girls danced, others hula hooped and a couple did gymnastics(dancing exercise). Everyone danced to the Macarana but a few boys didn't. Everyone freestyled a lot of dancing, You would not be able to count. Dancing was fun!

     One of the last things we did was a ceremony.  During our CLAYMO ceremony we all got a chance to come up to Mrs.Scott while Ms. McMillion put a lanyard around our neck.This lanyard represents leadership. But as well we got a letter, this letter was from someone else in our life.They wrote about how we are leaders.They also gave us examples of our leadership about when we were younger and started to show that we had what it takes to be a leader. 

Today at the CLAYMO Retreat we had to document our data by writing in our leadership journals that the teachers gave us.  They gave us questions about leadership and what we would do as a leader.  We learned what to do and we documented it.  Every fifth grader got one of these journals.  We wrote and answered all the questions about leadership and about ourselves.  We got quiet time when we wrote in our journal so we could not get distracted by other kids writing.  We wrote our talents and how we are a leader and kind of show how we are a leader by our special talents. 

 At the end of our day we watched a Kid President Pep Talk video.    

Kid President was talking about how the world was boring and how to make it more awesome.  He said that we should just dance when we feel like it,  be awesome, and treat others the way you would want to be treated, and be a TEAM!

Kid President inspires us fifth-graders and teaches us how to be CLAYMO Leaders and be the one who shows it all and showing we are all unique in our own special way  and having all the Glenridge students look up to us.

Written by the class of 5M