Improving the Play-doh Process

We have completed our S.T.E.M unit with Mrs. Gibson (PACE/Gifted Teacher) and wanted to make sure you could see what we worked on throughout this unit.

It all started with the story, Michelle's MVP Award. In this story, Michelle plays on a hockey team who is trying to think of a fundraiser to go see a famous hockey player.  Michelle's idea of making play-doh is chosen as the way to raise money.  

After reading the story, students got to explore high quality play-doh

and low quality play-doh.

 Then the students got to mix ingredients and make observations about what happened.

Using those observations, they put steps in order for how they would make play-doh.

 After testing and making improvements two times, students were finally on their way to making high quality play-doh.  

Hopefully, your child brought his/her play-doh home and could talk a little bit about the process.  

Verbs, Museum, and Halloween

We have been talking about verbs lately.  More specifically, we have been working with verbs in the present.  In the next couple of weeks, we will work on verbs in the past and verbs in the future.

We wrote sentences about pictures.

We are also starting project that will take a good month, or so, to complete.  It is an autobiography-type project that focuses on verbs in the past (When I was little...), present (Now...), and future (When I grow up...).  

Project courtesy of Amy Lemons.

I also wanted to include some photos from our field trip to the Park City Museum.

quadricycle

We did a little Halloween writing, using our Step-Up to writing structure (topic, detail, explanation, conclusion):

First, we played a Halloween organization game.

Then, we used our sort to write an organized paragraph about Halloween.

Finally, here are some photos from our Halloween festivities:

A big "Thank You" to all of the parents who were able to join us!

5th Grade Buddies

We finally had the opportunity to meet our 5th grade reading buddies!  (These pictures only include one of our classes.  We will meet with the 5th grade class, again, when the other class is with me on a Friday.)  Right now, our focus with the 5th grade students is to get more "miles on the page."

I also wanted to include some photos from our final drafts of our animal homes projects.  They turned out super cute!