Super Second Grade

Second Grade is batty for bats. You might be tempted to say that we have bats in the belfry! The students created habitats and began research on a specific bat. All of the presentations were wonderful and the habitats were very creative. Our essential question for this unit is: Why are bats feared if they are so beneficial to our environment? Please discuss this with your student. The kids seem to be enjoying the novel Silverwings. It reinforces several of the concepts that we have learned in class. For example, the bats roost in a colony inside a tree; they use echolocation to hunt, fathers are not allowed in the nursery, and they meet up with the fathers in order to hibernate. We are focusing on vocabulary development as well. We continue to work on logic weekly and I am seeing improvement in logic puzzle solving. The students loved learning a little bit about flight. I was so impressed by the students who knew that in order to fly one would need the following forces weight, thrust, and lift. Through our flying activity we learned that humans stay “airborne” for less then one second, and that the tallest students do not necessarily jump the highest. Ask your student to explain the difference between macro- chiroptera, and micro-chiroptera bats. We really enjoyed our speaker Dr. Stephen Barnett, he had a very informative power point presentation and we saw three bats.

   Fantastic Fifth Grade

Newsflash! Newsflash! Newsflash! Newsflash! Newsflash!

Parent Information Meeting October 11, 2007 on Robotics.

Please attend in order to volunteer. We have two sessions scheduled: 7:45 am-8:45 am  or 6:30 pm-7:30 pm

We are registering for our competition on October 5, 2007 and as soon as we know the exact time and date I will update our blog.  The students are excited about the new computer refresh as we will have two computers per team. This week the students will be introduced to the competition missions and will apply their programming knowledge to successfully complete each mission required for the competition. The students will research alternative energy sources and write and perform a skit for competition. All of the students’ energy will be focused on competition starting this week. Please be aware that the students will need to stay after school in order to perfect the missions and be ready to represent

Mountain View

.

Fabulous Fourth Grade

Our creative intelligence will take us through the mystery of the “

River

of

Venom

” while trying to solve the situation at hand.  What is the conclusion?  Was it a bee sting or perhaps a food allergy, read along and draw a conclusion.  We will learn about allergies, anaphylactic shock, venom and much more as we travel through the rainforest in search of clues!  We will develop a better understanding of this biome instead of developing a fear of the unknown.  As we continue our research through the tropical rainforest we will take a short detour to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History to learn more about some of the amphibians that call this habitat home.  Our construction of the rainforest will soon begin… watch for updated pictures of our progress.