This week we finished watching the BBC’s Planet Earth: Mountains program.  The students loved it!  With amazing photography, well presented facts and Sir David Attenborough narrating, who wouldn’t love it?!

This program kicked off our biome study and our next group project.  The students were broken into groups, given a mountain range to study and a general list of expectations.  Within their groups, the students can decide how they would like to break up their workload.   It will be a fantastic learning process for the students in our class as they figure out how to work with each other to create a presentation that they will share with the class March 28th.

Today we also started our poetry unit, beginning with a figurative language review, using lyrics from pop songs to illustrate metaphor, simile, hyperbole and personification.  The students have interactive notebook pages to work on to help drive the concept home (no pun intended).

Level 6 spent the morning working on an open ended question that allowed them to practice math, language and critical thinking skills.  We will have more problems like this in the future to stretch their comfort zone and allow them freedom to explore.  This week we also discussed the first continental congress and the students chose one of the intolerable acts to present to the group.  This is a small research project, one that will be done completely in class.

Level 5 students were given a lesson on the difference between estimating and guessing.  We used a jar of pennies as our prop.  They were then asked to answer several questions and complete a graph using their data.  This week in science we were lucky enough to have Ms. Amy’s dad, Mr. Bob, give a lesson about electromagnets.  He also brought all of the supplies for building electromagnets.  It was a big hit amongst the kids.