Our final project of the year is to create a stop motion historical fiction movie about the California gold rush of 1849. After researching and learning about the gold rush in social studies and reading, student began building their movie sets last week. This week they are connecting the topic to computer science and stop motion apps to film and add audio to the movies.
What a wonderful celebration of our learning last week, as the Living Museum saw hundreds of students and many parents attend.
Today we began putting all of our research together for our Living Museum project. Using all the source notecards we have taken over the past three weeks, we first started by highlighting all the facts that we felt were most important. Then we broke the cards into categories, to become the different sections of our written paper. After this, we numbered the facts in each category to create a more organized, linear order for the facts to appear in our writing. Finally, we started pulling it all together and typing it up in first-person point of view. This will take several days, but will produce some top-notch writings.
As we began to learn of the 4-quadrants on a coordinate plane, in preparation for 6th grade, we played Battleship today. Each student drew six ships on their coordinate plane. Then, using the quadrants, they guessed at where their partner's ships were placed. Tomorrow we dig into the book activities on the same concept.
Unable to do the school's usual art show, our school decided to connect art into being thankful for something in the community. Our class chose to be thankful to the USPS drivers during Covid, and staying true to delivering the mail and packages to all of our doors. Thanks USPS! We all made cards and a giant sign to give to USPS.
While learning about the three branches of government in class over the past few weeks, we were able to take advantage of having a local judge, Judge Pearson, talk to our class about the judicial branch on Wednesday through Zoom. I was so proud of the students, as they had taken great effort in writing good questions to ask him for the last twenty minutes. The judge mentioned twice how impressed the questions were. Students surely walked away from this experience knowing much more about our judicial system.
We started our forces and motion unit, which really looks at how gravity impacts objects at a 5th grade level. We built straw rockets and launched them this week, collecting data and making observations on their flights.
