States of Matter Fun

We had a bit of fun today. We are finishing up our unit on states of matter in science class. The students are clear about solids, liquids, and gasses, as well as the molecules behaviors that cause them to have their unique qualities. Our culminating activity included ice cream and soda. You guessed it, ice cream floats! Students made predictions about the gasses that would be created and observed what happened when they mixed the cold solid with the liquid. 

The Ends

The fourth grade is part of a pilot program at Hartford using online portfolios. This  year each student has created a portfolio and are now beginning to put in work that they are proud to show their academic success.  This week we started to dig deeper into these mysterious things called, "The Ends."

The idea of the online portfolios is that they will be used by every student in the district for their entire school career. It will be a place to collect work that they have done that shows how far they have come in all aspects of being a student. These aspects are broken down into what are called, The Ends. They include: Citizenship, Life Skills, Health and Well Being, Global Awareness, Academic Excellence, and Technology/ Information Skills.

The fourth grade team decided to start the process slowly. We chose to focus only on two areas this year, technology and academic excellence.  So this week we began to really look at Technology and Information Skills and what that means to our students. We broke down this end into manageable goals that the students could understand. We asked them to brainstorm ways that they are already showing and demonstrating their knowledge of this particular End.  We then broke them into smaller groups and gave them each one goal to focus on. Each group came up with a skit that could be used to teach younger students about the Technology End. Here is the video that they created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLvSKjfVEk

Density Experiment

  Ask your kids about density tonight!  They should be able to tell you that things with more molecules are more dense and things with less molecules are less dense. We spent the afternoon playing with water, oil, corn syrup (they loved that!), pennies, plastic, hard candy and cork! We tested their densities by creating what I called a liquid sandwich. Check out the photos below.

Reading Olympics

Today the fourth and fifth graders kicked off their Reading Olympics! For the next two weeks teams of four will be competing to see who can read the most minutes.  Students have been divided into twenty-one teams consisting of a mix of four students from both grades. Students will be recording when they read, and for how long. They will require an adult signature in order to keep everyone true to their word. Please encourage your child to read and to help their team win some great prizes! Friday, February 14th students will have a "Closing Ceremony" where gold, silver and bronze will be awarded.  Happy Reading!