The Night at the Museum

Here are the pictures I took of everyone who came to see The Night at the Museum. We had fun! I just wish I had taken more pictures! :) I plan on doing this again in Oct.? when Where the Wild Things Are comes out.

So watch and see when we plan on going and you can join us! :)

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Class/Family Night to see:

Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian

When: Friday, May 22 @ 7:00
Where: Kerasotes Theaters on Washington Street
Dinner: McDonald's (New Pal) @ 5:30ish

Don't forget this is not a school sponsored trip; just something that I thought would be fun to do together. All families will be responsible for their own dinner and tickets to the movie. :)

Please let me know if you plan to attend so that we can all try to sit together! Also, since this is opening weekend of the movie, we should probably be at the theater no later than 6:30.

See you Friday! :)

Our Top 3 Insects

This morning, our rookie entomologists showed off their insect "discoveries" and read about them to the class. Everyone did an EXCELLENT job on their insect creations!

Here are the top three insects the class voted to be the best.

#1 - The Wacky Yellow or Green Inflatable Intertube Bug
Discovered by Evan


#2 - The Weezle Beetle
Discovered by Gabby


#3 - The Brickbug
Discovered by Matthew T.

This afternoon

And the rain came down...

With all the rain this afternoon, we had an early recess (we had spent about 2 hours in the computer lab after lunch finishing up our insect project...they did an excellent job!).

Below are the kids who were very excited about putting together all the "puzzle piece game thingy"! Good job!

After recess they watched an episode of Prehistoric Park that about insects that lived back in prehistoric time. They/I love the Prehistoric Park series! It is made by the same people who made the Walking with Dinosaurs series. Thanks Brannon and Alex for letting us barrow it! This is one of their FAVORITE things to watch.

Here are the kids watching the movie. They were completely engrossed in it! :)

Here is the insect I created. It is called the "Idea Sucking Fly". Unfortunately, we seem to have an infestation of them in our class at times! ;)

Insect Creations

We have been studying insect. (this is one of my favorite units :-) We have learned what makes an insect an insect, how insects adapt to their surroundings, what kind of life cycle do different insects go through, etc. One activity I always do with my class is to create an insect. I encourage them to be creative! I told them to think about things that happen at school, home, or even the bus, that you could explain by creating an insect that did it. For example, "What causes all our things that we tape up in the hallway to fall down?" or "What causes every one's pencil led to break off in the pencil sharpener?" Yesterday they wrote about their insect (where it lives, what it eats, who are its enemies, and 3 interesting facts) and typed everything up on the computers. Today, they created their insect using all kinds of things, from sticks and pipe cleaners to aluminum foil and googly eyes. They all turned out REALLY well!

Here are some pictures of the kids making their insects.
I am going to have the kids choose who's insect project is the best, and post the top 5!

Insects

THE INSECTS ARE COMING!!!

THE INSECTS ARE COMING!!!

Color Survey

I gave the kids a color survey to see how different colors make them feel, or what they associate with different colors. These were the interesting results. :)

Red = hot, love, and warning

Pink = happy, love, and spring

Orange = hot and fall

Yellow = happy, spring, and summer

Green = money, nature, and spring

Blue = cold and calm

Purple = good and calm

Brown = nature and fall

Black = bad and hate

Gray = sad and winter

White = cold and white

Other interesting findings on the survey were that no one thought that these colors were associated to these things. (does that make sense? :-)

Red is not a calm color.

Pink is not bad or cold, or associated with hate.

Yellow is not associated with bad.

Green doesn't make them feel sad, bad, or cold, and it is not a warning color.

Blue is not associated with the word hot.

When it come to seasons, these are the colors they think of.

Spring = pink, yellow, green

Summer = yellow

Fall = orange, brown

Winter = winter, white

Personal Flags

This week, we read a story in our reading book about the American flag. To go along with the story, we learned about flags and made our own flag. We first looked at the 12 main types of flags. Some of the names of these flags are the tricolor vertical flag, bicolor horizontal flag, quartered flag, and bordered flag. Then we discussed colors, and how certain colors symbolize certain things or make you feel a certain way. Bright colors like yellow and orange can symbolize happiness. Blue and green are calming colors. Earth and nature can be symbolized by brown and green. We put our knowledge of flags and symbolism to work by looking at various flags in books and discussing what their different parts mean. Then we were ready to create our own flag about ourselves.

For this project, the students had to choose a type of flag, use at least 3 colors that would symbolize something about themselves, and include 1 symbol on their flag. Then they wrote about their flag and what each part symbolized. I was amazed at what a wonderful job all the kids did on the flag project!

Earth Day Shirts

Yesterday we worked on coloring special Earth Day shirts that we are going to wear tomorrow for Earth Day. They were also watching the movie Fern Gully while they were coloring. That's why some of the kids have that glazed over "I'm watching TV" look on their face. (You know... we ALL do it! :-)

Goop

To wrap up our chapter on the properties of matter in science, I thought that it would be fun to have the kids make goop. Goop is a weird substance that, when done right, is both a solid and a liquid. It is really cool. My class made it last year, and it went pretty well. The recipe calls for both white Elmer's glue and starch. Unfortunately, this year things didn't go as well as last year. All we did was end up making a big sticky goopy gluey mess!

Here are some pictures of our "experiment". In the end, they had fun.

And on a Friday before a holiday, that's what counts! :)

It was so messy and runny, that I had to have the kids stick their hands in their cup and they had to be walked, with me holding the cup, to the bathroom to wash their hands.