Our winter break is here!  The cold has finally found us hiding in Chatham!  

What are you doing/done over the break?  Did you go anywhere unique?

Leave us some comments about your adventures over break.    I’ll report back from my trip to Chicago and Indianapolis.  

-Mr. Lund

Here is my report from my visit to Indy!

 On January 1, Uncle Dan and Aunt Amy went to Indianapolis to see Ethan and Olivia. After a few hours at the Lund’s house, we took the kids to the hotel! Olivia was very excited when she saw the water slides sticking out of the hotel! I don’t think she really understood what she was seeing, but the colorful tubes were impressing her.

We quickly checked into the the hotel and went straight to the pool. Ethan and Olivia loved the kiddie area with a jungle gym structure set into a shallow pool. Ethan liked to control the water by turning the values on the gym set. Olivia quickly found the lazy river and traveled many laps around and around.

Ethan and Olivia ventured onto the slides once or twice each. They went down the “yellow, tube slide” with Uncle Dan. Poor Olivia was the first one down the slide with Uncle Dan. Unfortunately for her, halfway down the slide, we rolled off of our inner tube and had to scoot down the rest of the way. Poor Ethan had a faster trip down the slide, but we bounced off our inner tube and plunged into the pool at the end. Needless to say, they liked it enough to go down it again the NEXT day!

Enjoy the videos! I’ve posted it on Vimeo and Youtube just to compare the quality of the videos. The Vimeo video should be in full high def quality.

Dan

VIMEO.COM VIDEO -High Def!

Untitled from D. Lund on Vimeo.

On Thursday, December 18, the students found out their assigned parts for the Health Play!   “Cinderella’s Magical Mystery Tour to American Idol” will be presented in May!  The students should begin learning their parts because practices will begin in February with our director, Mr. Mahan.  The scripts, music, and updates will be posted on the GIS Health Play Wiki.  

Are you excited?

Using this picture as your muse, create a poem to share with the class! You can use any style that we’ve learned in class to write your poem or the poem can be in the form of free verse. I’m excited to read the poems!

The story begins a few weeks ago. I was looking around the blog world and found a neat blog called the Scared Heart Reading Blog.  The blog and reading club is run by Mrs. Cunningham at her school in Rochdale, England.

Her blog had an interesting post that asked the question, “Would Harry Potter be popular in 100 years?”  I left a comment and several of my students found their way to the blog and left some comments too!  Mrs. Cunningham came to our blog and left a comment.  These comments lead to an idea that our classes swap books so that we could experience “typical” British and American books.  

Using the British site for Amazon.com, our reading specialist, Mrs. Larson suggested a few books that didn’t seem popular in England.  As a class, we discussed some of our favorite books and series and selected three books to send across the Atlantic.  Our class sent Pecos Bill by Steven Kellogg, Chasing Vermeer by Blu Ballet, and Super Fudge by Judy Blume to our new friends.

That brings us to this week.  I received an excited email from Mrs. Cunningham stating that our books had finally arrived in Rochdale, England.  To our surprise, her students have already enjoyed the American Tall Tale, Pecos Bill!  Our class thought that these tall tales were uniquely American!  Her kids have decided to do some book reviews and blurb posters to send to us along with a book or two!  Wow!  What a great idea!

My class is thinking that a live conversation might be fun between the two classes. Maybe we could have a transatlantic lit. circle discussion?  Our class has been testing Skype with another class in our building.  

What ideas or reactions do you have about this exciting news? 

- Mr. Lund

After much demand, here is math challenge #10.  Watch over winter break for another challenge!

How many addition signs should be put between digits of the number 987654321 and where should we put them to get a total of 99?  Bonus points for students that submit multiple correct answers!  

For this challenge,  just respond with the digits and the addition signs…. 

-Mr. Lund

Cool Math 4 Kids has some great problems to try at home! 

( I wish we had more time for these types of interactive activities at school!) 

Good Luck!  Please post about your experiences!

-Mr. Lund

http://www.coolmath4kids.com/math_puzzles/Logic-bridgecrossing/index.html

We have just started studying poetry in class.   The students are reading ,writing, and interpreting poetry.  After talking to the class, we thought it would be fun to create poetry in our blog.  

I’ve been reading a great blog called The Miss Rumphius Effect for about a year.  On her blog, she challenges readers to write unique poems a few times a month.  Based upon this idea, I give you our first poetry stretch!

The first poetry stretch is written with the goal that ALL of our READERS will spend a few moments and create a poem.  Poetry Stretch #1 should be an acrostic poem about this changing season of cold and snow! An acrostic poem takes a word, written vertically.  Each lines describes the topic, using strong word choice to convey the emotion of the season/word.  Here is an example.  This poem comes from the A Different Place website.

Whistling, howling, whirling winds,
In winter form icy crystals
Now a blanket of cold shrouds the earth,
Trembling branches break,
Eerie sounds echo through the woods
Replying to the wind’s fury.

So, what kind of acrostic will you write for winter? Pick a word that describes our winter and write away. 

-Mr. Lund

This is a student describing how to find the angles of a triangle and their total measurement. 

triangle

Welcome to a new feature to our classroom blog!  YOU DECIDE asks students and their families to share how they would handle a difficult situation.  The situations will be realistic.  The situations could happen to fifth graders.  There is not a single best answer.  All ideas will be accepted.  Think about the best way to handle a situation.  Talk to you friends and family to get their opinions.  Post a comment with your ideas!

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My birthday is coming up and I am having the party at Knights Action Park. There are ten friends I want to invite, but my parents have told me that I can only invite five of them. I don’t want to hurt any feelings or make my friends mad, but I have to obey my parents. I need to narrow it down to five friends…and fast! How should I decide? What should I do? Help!

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Thank you to Mr. Mundorf for this great blogging idea!