Wednesday Night News by Caelan

Sports: Charlie is back from a hand injury and football has taken over the field.  

Soccer kids are still fighting for it but the football kids won't let that happen!

90% of people want to play football and 10% of people want to play soccer. Will it stay this way or will it change? Stick around for more Caelan Elijah sports.

MATH: We have started a new unit on graphs. We have learned what a bar graph

and a line plot are. We even got to eat raisins! We are measuring 1st graders today (Oct. 19, 2016) and I hope they are tall. We haven't got too far in math pages.

WRITING: I like writing myself how about you? Anyways we had to write a small moment story. I wrote a story about my first touchdown.

Goodnight America!

Wednesday Night News by Elijah

Sports:   Football has taken over again. Soccer has died.

Math: WE HAVE STARTED OUR GRAPH UNIT. It is so much fun and yummy. My favorite graph is a bar graph. My next favorite is a line plot. We get to measure people.

Reading: Reading is fun because you get to read for half an hour (or more) each day.

Writing: We get to work on our writing skills and small moment story.

Good night America!

Library Field Trip

Yesterday we had a terrific time on our walking field trip to the M.N. Spear Library! There are lots more pictures of our adventure on our photos page. Thank you to Ms. L. and Mary Anne Antonellis for making this day possible! 

NASA's Climate Kids Website

Earlier today I discovered NASA's Climate Kids website. It features lots of interactive ways (including games!) to learn more about climate change and how to help our planet. Check it out!

Terrible Losses

By Shae

Recently, we got snails to eat the algae in our class fish tank. They were excellent at keeping the tank nice and clean. Their names were: Bob,Sunny, Tiger, and Shnaily. Their jobs were to clean; they were the power cleaners. One beautiful morning in the tank,  the fish caretaker spotted an uneasy sight. Bob was upside down. He was brought out to be inspected. He smelled awful and didn’t move. So he was brought outside and buried. The loss seemed to affect the others. Shnaily couldn’t take it. He never ate from his sadness, and sadly died a week later. The others were torn, but stayed strong longer than Shnaily had. About two weeks later, Sunny passed. Leaving Tiger to fend for himself.

ELECTRICITY SEVEN! Solar Cell Edition!!

by The Electricians: Declan, and Arin

with guest speakers: Cedar and Alex

Quote by Cedar!

We’re back after a long absence to give you the longest and most edge-of-your-seat electricity blog yet! Did Queen Scarlet eat us again? I hope not.

We were making flashlights last time, and now we have moved on to solar experiments with motors, buzzers, LED’s, and of course, amazingly awesome solar cells. See pictures below for the full scoop on what happened. And also read the rest, because believe me, you won’t understand a thing if you don’t.

WITH:

Alex — Researcher at the Shutesbury Academy for Experienced Electricians (solar group)

Cedar — Wise scientist from the Gradefour School of Solar Powered People

Alex says in his lengthened explanation about what happened today, “Today we used solar panels to power different things like the buzzer, the fan/motor, the LED, and multimeter that told how much volts we’re creating.”

Arin says, looking back on past blog excitements and comparing them with this one, “I’ve really never seen any mode of energy compared with this one in what it can do for the environment and electricity.”

Let’s look at some of the other kinds of sources of electricity that the Electricians would never agree with.

Nuclear, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are things that can really harm the environment and us. “It was really fun to power things with clean energy that produces no emissions,” says Declan, who is like, the person who you should go to when you want a good persuasive essay on why those are “REALLY, VERY BAD” fuels.

Today we looked at a fountain that was powered by a large solar cell. The little spout that returned the water and put it out again was connected by wires to, technically, the sun.

Now let’s look at all of the kinds of sources of electricity that the Electricians do agree with.

Wind, biomass (a little), hydro, ocean, and SOLAR!!!!!!!!

Next week we will talk about the town that we are making, powered by solar and wind.

“Solar panels can produce a LOT of energy,”

--Cedar, electrician of the week

Mindfulness of Scent

Today during MindUp we practiced being mindful of our sense of smell and learned how this sense is connected to emotions and memories. We had 8 mystery smell canisters that students silently sniffed and then wrote reflections about. They tried to figure out the source of each smell, and also noted what feelings or memories a smell brought up. As you might imagine, there were some crowd-favorite smells (pine, citrus peel, coffee grinds, mint toothpaste) and some that almost cleared the room (raw garlic, wasabi). It was a scent-sational experience!

“I learned that smell brings back memories. If you smell something like, for example your grandma’s perfume, it reminds you of your grandma.” 
—Gianna