Halloween at BGS

We had such a fun day for our Halloween celebration at school!  We started the day with our school-wide Halloween parade in the gym - each class has a turn at parading around the gym, so we all get to see everyone else's costumes!  Then our school PTO provided a donut and juice for every student for a snack after the parade.  We had pumpkins that had been donated by our amazing parents, so we divided up into groups of 2-4 students and did a "Pumpkin Investigation".  We estimated and measured different parts of our pumpkins, then Mrs. G cut them open, and we got to explore their "guts"!  After lunch we had Halloween centers - we made Halloween-style avatars on the laptops (cartoon versions of ourselves), decorated the pumpkins from the morning, created Frankenstein-style monsters by cutting apart people in magazines, wrote stories about our Frankensteins, wrote "corny" Halloween jokes on candy corn shapes, made Halloween graphs, and practiced measuring by making snack mix.  It was a fun day and it went so fast - at the very end of the day we enjoyed the cutest Halloween cupcakes and listened to a customized Halloween story that one of our students had written (it featured every student in our class!). And the class walked out the door with a Halloween treat bag to take home!  Halloween celebrations at school don't get much better than days like this!

Lima Beans

Today we did a lot of fun things!  We started the day with art, where we started making a spider that we are sewing buttons onto to be its feet and head.  Then we had our YouthFriends from BHS come to visit during math class. We worked on a really hard math puzzle all together.  Then we had chili for lunch.  After lunch, we had the classroom store, where we got to spend the pretend money that we have earned in our pretend checkbooks.  After that, we checked out our lima beans that we planted one week ago.  Some of them were growing (the ones that had been dried) and some of them were not growing (the ones from in a can).  We had also put lima beans in wet paper towels inside of baggies on the window sill and we looked at those today.  All of them had roots.  Some of them had leaves and some of them were moldy! Almost everyone's lima beans in the baggies had started to grow, in just 7 days!  Then after recess, we had library class, and we got to go to the AR store today and spend our AR points that we earn by reading books and passing tests!
These are pictures of our lima beans, and of the new seeds that we planted today (sunflowers, daisies, cornflowers, and columbines).

Trip to the Corn Maze

Today we went to the corn maze as a 4th grade field trip.  It was a blast!  We used our GPS units to navigate our way through the maze in small groups, listened to the Gaedderts talk about crops and soils in Kansas, and played in the "aMAZEing Playland" - especially the jumping pillow and the big slides!
Enjoy checking out the photos of our fun day!

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Today we used a new Gizmo in science.  It lets us grow different kinds of seeds with different VARIABLES (our newest science word!).  It's pretty amazing to see an entire 50-day experiment happen in just a couple of minutes!  This is a screenshot of what one of our experiments looked like at the end.
Yesterday in science class we planted real lima beans.  Half of us planted dried lima beans and half of us planted lima beans from out of a can, to see if they can grow.  We planted them in plastic cups and put them on the windowsill in the sun.  We can't wait until they sprout!
Everyone also "planted" a lima bean in a plastic baggie, wrapped in a wet paper towel.  We are going to see how long it takes for the beans to sprout without soil.

We are practicing making graphs in math - so far we have been using pictographs, bar graphs, and double bar graphs.  We have been making graphs after we survey the class, and graphs that show our class eye colors and hair color.
In Social Studies, we just started learning about the NorthEast region of the U.S.  Yesterday and today we watched a Discovery Channel video clip about the crops and land in the NE area.  We also made a map of the states and their capitols.
In writing, we are writing stories that explain how to do a specific activity.  In class yesterday, we worked together to describe how to make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich.  Everyone chose their own idea to write their story about.
Today we finished the book we've been reading out loud in class, "Extra Credit" by Andrew Clements.  It was about a boy in Afghanistan and a girl in America who become pen pals.