Stop Motion

It's a dog eat dog world.  Oh, wait.  Dogs don't eat dogs.  Vielleux Crew kids know that.  We're learning about the interconnected webs that make up our world-- in our study of the food web.  Here are our stop motion animation  videos of food chains.  This was our first attempt at stop motion, and thanks to Miss Schneider, they were a huge hit!

Virtual Owl Pellets

Hey, Vielleux Crew Kids!  Check out this great site, where you get to "virtually" dissect owl pellets!  Try it online before we try it for real!

http://www.kidwings.com/owlpellets/flash/v4/index.htm

Happy Thanksgiving

What a great group of kids! Best holiday greetings to all of you and your families, and remember Vielleux crew kids: get on www.xtramath.org four out of the five days and earn a $10 classroom buck bonus.

Kids can also start reading their biographies. Our class choices range from Bill Gates to Annie Oakley!

Biography Fair Announced

It's time for the BIOGRAPHY FAIR!  Starting Monday, November 19th students will begin choosing their focus people.  Click on the Biography Fair Banner to bring you to the project information.

You will also find a slideshow of past presentations to help you with your showboard.

Biography Fair

5V Poetry

Ms. Schneider and the poets of 5V created some amazing, colorful poetry based on William Carlos Williams and William Blake.  Here they are-- click on the slideshow to make the pictures larger.

Our Presidential Blabbers

VOTE FOR SOMEBODY

The kids at democracy prep have a great song to remind us why it's important to vote.  Check it out here:

Budding Politicians

At snack today, without any prompting from adults, these kids set up a debate, picked parties and began to argue.  While their facts might need to be checked, their enthusiasm can't be rivaled!

Branches of Government Project Announced

On Wednesday of this week, the fifth grade teachers will be talking to students about our "Branches of Government Project."

Click here to access the google doc of this project.

Fifth graders will be partnered up with one or two other students for this collaborative, technology-based interdisciplinary project.

Earthquake!

Besides scaring the jeepers out of most of us, the earthquake centered in Maine that happened a couple of nights ago caused quite a stir in the school.  Mother nature may have been cooperating with us a little since fifth graders had JUST finished taking their Earth's Changing Surface Unit test.  Because they were experts, we sent four budding scientists to the first grades to share their knowledge.  Watch the highlights:

Roundup!

This week was busy with writing, reading and learning.  We started the week by learning about prime factor trees.  We then used these trees to help us solve number puzzles.  Students should be comfortable with the terms:  prime, composite, factor, commutative property, order of operations.  In science, we've begun to study Earth's Changing Surface, a unit that focuses on the rock cycle, layers of the earth and changes in Vermont's landscape through time.  Once again, we have a song to go with our learning:

Divergent, convergent or transform?

Cutting the Earth is serious business

Is this the elusive raw eggs?

Look at my egg!

Is this the raw one?

Pushing and squeezing to see the "plate" movements

More pushing and squeezing

More scientific slicing of the "Earth"

We explored the basics of plate movement using hard boiled eggs from my hens!  We carefully cracked the "crust" and experimented with how to make the shells simulate different plate movements.  Next week, we're going to learn more about Pangaea, plate tectonics, volcanoes, and earthquakes.  In the meantime, be sure to have some family fun making the volcano models.  Be as creative as you want!  We'll be sure to videotape the eruptions!

Why I Love Google Apps

We've just introduced Google Apps to the fifth graders this year, but I am reminded why I love it so much each and every time I check my email.  Google Apps for education connects students and teachers after the school bell has dismissed for the day, and it maintains that connection throughout the years.  Today when I checked my inbox, I was surprised with a shared document from a former student.  He shared some of his favorite quotes from a book that he is reading at HMMS, and what the quotes taught him.

I also received emails from students tonight asking questions about assignments and projects!  Using their email really empowers kids to communicate.

Oh, and I shouldn't forget that one student emailed me a presentation all about elephants.  He had done some research about them because Sunday is National Elephant Day!

Not Your Average Finger Trick

Check this out!  I really thought this was going to be your standard finger trick for multiplication... not so!  This trick will help you figure out 6x6 all the way to 10x10.  WOW!

Water Cycle Comics

Great job, Vielleux Crew kids!  Your water cycle comics look fantastic.  This was a performance assessment task to see how well the students learned the basics of the water cycle.  Here are some samples!

I love how this one shows the importance of the sun in the evaporation process.

Fantastic example!

And clearly, this student understands the process is ongoing!

Indirect Bullying

Water Cycle Rap

Can you learn the water cycle song?  Disregard the creator's poor spelling in places.  The content is great.

Yo! Yes?

Today we learned about two important writing traits:  Voice and conventions.  Following a VERY INTERACTIVE lesson, kids used their knowledge of voice and conventions to create their own "conversation" using a very limited list of words and punctuation.  Listen very closely to their intonation to see if they punctuated their conversation properly!

 Conversation script #1

Conversation #1



Conversation script #2

Conversation #2

First Day of School Questions

Vielleux Crew kids and parents:  What questions do you still have after the first day of school?

What questions do you have after our first day of school?... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Out of my Comfort Zone

My theme for the week (self-imposed, of course) has been "out of my comfort zone."  In my oldish age, I have fallen victim to the ruts and routines that I expect.  This week, I branched out.  On a shopping trip, I bought some school clothes that were out of my ordinary.  I read some things that I wouldn't have normally. Why not branch out of my comfort zone with my final project for the course I am taking this summer, Techsploration 2012?

My project is a two part and focuses on a Google App that I am the least comfortable with-- Google sites.  I find Google sites to be the LEAST intuitive App available, and the most confusing one to work with.  However, I had a purpose.  As president of the local teacher's union, I needed a way to stay in communication with members across more than 5 buildings, as well as a way to archive documents like meeting minutes and updates. I thought perhaps a Google Site might be perfect.  I hope that the site can be one that members of the HEA can use as a resource or communication tool, while providing some stable, generic information about the mission of the HEA.

At the same time, I am newly recruited to help run the Greater Hartford Youth Football Association's Minicanes Teams.  Next year, my football-loving son will be playing for the team, and I'll be there anyways, so why not?  What a good way to become involved in a great program with two good  teacher friends, Tracy Thompson and Gigi Stone!  So I volunteered my less than stellar Google Sites experience to create the Minicanes' first website.  I hope that coaches, staff members and parents are able to use the site to get valuable information like procedures, schedules, directions to games and forms.

The first site I created was the Hartford Education Association site.  Here's a screen shot of the site:

It took me a whole to figure out how to edit the pages and get things set up the way I wanted to.  I did a lot of googling like "How to __________ in Google Sites."  You fill in the blank.  I am sure I googled it.  I have some basic information about the officers for both the teachers and the support staff, as well as meeting dates and times, and I even added a place where I can update members of issues.  For example, the most recent issue was the fact that of the 17 companies that employees send 403b retirement contributions to, ZERO of them were compliant with the IRS regulations.

About a week later, I started on the minicanes site.  For this website, we needed our own url-- something the parents and community would be able to remember.  So I resisted the urge to call my computer nerd brother, and purchased the desired url from a website (yikes).  Then I figured out how to add that url to the google site.  This whole process was tricky to me, and hopefully I didn't make a mistake.  All I know is that when you type www.minicanes.com into your browser, you get to the right site.  Check it out!

I will know if I am successful with these sites if people use them.  I haven't explored it too much, but I hope that google tracks data about the sites like blogger does.  If parents and staff find the sites to be useful then I have done what I set out to do.  While, I can't share the url for the HEA site until I share the site with returning members, please check out the Minicanes site, and provide any feedback you have!

What makes someone tech savvy?

This.  The ability to try things out and fail.  Then you might need to fail some more, ask someone a fraction of your age for help, and try it again.  THAT's what makes someone tech savvy-- actually that's what makes someone a learner.  If you put a set of K'nex in front of me WITH the step-by-step directions, and I will have the thing built by, oh, Y3K.  That same set, in the hands of a former former fifth grader who read on a first grade level-- he had that thing built in 10 minutes flat with an itemized list of the pieces I was missing.

Forgive my harsh words (and this word is one of my LEAST favorites), but at the recent BEST conference, we teachers joked that we all suck at something-- and we need to embrace our suckiness and ask for help in order to overcome it.  Kids need to know that it's okay to suck at things, and it's okay to admit that you suck.  That's how we know what we need to learn.

Rock on, Grandma.

Do you 2.0 and Avatar Fun!

I have been playing around with various web2.0 tools this week, and evaluating which I might want to use with my class this coming year.  First, I played with Voki.  It was easy to set up an account, but once I tried to create my avatar, I was very frustrated.  The free avatar choices were not very good-- I didn't want to pay the yearly fee just to get an avatar I liked.

My favorite avatar style is one that looks like the Wii Mii's (maybe that's what they're called), and a person I follow on Twitter now (thanks to the Dynamic Landscapes Conference) is Jennifer LaGarde-- or as she is known by her twitter handle:

I love the style of her avatar... cartoonish, and cute, and looks just like the real person (minus the cartoonish part).

I have been searching the net off and on for months trying to figure out how to make an avatar in that style-- which clearly was a big old brain fart on my part.  Why did I not just tweet her to find out?  So I have now done just that!

And ironically, LibraryGirl, just tweeted this-- literally 5 minutes before I tweeted her:

The link will bring you to a page describing 20 different ways to create an avatar, and one of them will even put your head in a jar.  Seriously...check it out here.  I think I even found the way to make the cute wii mii person like LibraryGirl.

I have also been playing around with Edmodo.  It was super easy to set up an account and I was quickly able to set up my page.  I like that it looks like a Facebook page-- I have a feeling that my class this coming year is fairly savvy with Facebook.  I need to play around with it more to see what it is capable of.  Maybe I'll send out a tweet to see what other teachers think.

---   ---   ---   ---

Ok... so I'm now back a couple of hours later to say that I am absolutely having sooooooo much fun playing with avatars.  Here are the one's I have played with from the link found above:

My lego avatar

My Simpsons Avatar

I Picasso'd my face

   and my favorite so far

Wee Mee

And I still find myself playing.  The kids would really love to "Wimp" themselves at www.wimpyourself.com!  Here's my wimp avatar: 

Here, I played on www.clayyourself.com and made a clay avatar:

Google Apps for Ed and Learning

This week, as part of my Summer Techsploration class, I was asked to play around with some of Google's apps for education.  The first app I started with was MAPS.  By customizing a map, I am able to create my own interactive map.  We always begin the year with a study of the US Government, so I was right away intrigued by mapping out the three main buildings in Washington D.C. that represent the three branches of government.   I love the way Google Maps make you feel like you are standing in the middle of the street, or in another case, in the middle of the White House.  This is a great way for Vermont students to take a virtual tour of our government buildings.

There is nothing like looking at some of the actual places we study.  It was also interesting to see where the buildings were in relation to each other.  Using the draw tool, I connected the three buildings.  In the future, I might ask the kids to find Dothan Brook School in order to put the location into perspective.

New Beginnings

The new year ahead will mark some new beginnings for me.  First, the fifth grade team will be new.  We're a variety of sorts, this new team, but we complement each other nicely.  I'm excited about all of the new and exciting things that the new year will bring us, but will still be missing and thinking about Mrs. McCullar a lot.

Here's the brand new Fifth Grade Team:

Mrs. Torrey, Mrs. Vielleux, Mr. Burns

Next, our school is moving forward with our plans to continue some of the PBiS projects we planned this summer.  A team of us just got back from the BEST Summer Institute in Killington, where we were the proud winners of the Scavenger Hunt.  We also got to pose for a picture with Vermont's Commissioner of Education, Armando Vilaseca.  What a day!

VACATION

Ahhh... yes.  I made it.  What a week it's been.  We've wrapped up our latest book groups and are presenting book projects this week.  It's great to hear the kids' interpretations of events-- they all have such different perspectives on things.

During vacation, encourage your kids to do a little practice work to keep the skills from getting rusty.
Bonus bucks will be awarded to any students who bring these assignments back on Monday after vacation.


Click here for a math practice page

Kids, sign into your google accounts to access this book and comprehension worksheet.

You'll get more information about the battles of the American Revolution.  Have a great vacation, and read, read, read.

Colonial Kids

Thanks to Kate Townsend, DBS Art Teacher, the students turned their portraits into "Colonial Portraits." Can you tell who these kids are?




And whoops... two accidentally got left out of the book, so they get their own spot.

What a Strange Week It's Been!

Want to know the easiest way to get 17 fifth graders off task quickly?  Here it is:

And that was at 4:22!  Imagine it at noon!  Which is the best backdrop for a conversation about RESPECT.  As a staff we took a look at the Student Support Forms over the past month and the vast majority had something to do with disrespectful behavior.  So we asked ourselves, "What is respect?"  Break out groups of teachers in similar grade levels came up with brainstorms.

Here are the 4th and 5th grade teachers' ideas for what respect looks like, feels like and sounds like:

There's a lot of "grumbling" out loud going on in the fourth and fifth grades about activities kids don't want to do.  Plus, as teachers, we decided there was a list of NON-NEGOTIABLES for fourth and fifth graders: 

• eye rolling, stomping, pouting, groaning
• body away from the group
• calling out
• arguing and back-talk

The next day, with my fifth graders, I had a great conversation with them and shared the startling data about the amount of disrespectful behavior going on.  They brainstormed similarly, and here are some of their responses-- please excuse the spelling!

I have a pretty smart bunch of kids!

We also finished Tuck Everlasting-- which is the epitome of why a book should not be judged by its cover.  At the beginning of the book I asked the kids if they would want to live forever.  The overwhelming majority thought they would like to.  The age they would want to stay varied, but none of them wanted to be any older than 21.  Imagine thinking that 21 is old!  Anyways, later in the book, I asked them again, and many more students were questioning their original choice.  They were mesmerized by the adventure, thrilled by the mystery, and confused by the odd toad in the story.  I promised them we'd watch the video and compare the movie and the book.

Here's one student's doodle of the scene that takes place at the magic spring near the old ash tree:

Watch Liberty and Justice's Babies Hatch

We've been watching two bald eagles care for their baby and 2 eggs this morning.  Check out the site by clicking the photo below.

Link to other Upper Elementary Blogs

Ever wonder what is going on around the country in other classrooms?  Check out the link to the blogs below.

Parents! Vote to send John Herman to Space!

This morning on my way to working I was listening to the radio and learned of a competition to send someone to space in 2012.  John Herman, a NH teacher, is one of the finalists.  You can view his video here.  I think his message is a great one-- look at the amazement a baby has with the world he or she is learning about.  As teachers and parents we should instill in our kids a sense of wonder with things around them no matter how ordinary or extraordinary something is.  There's always something to wonder about.

Kindles for Math Practice

This morning the kids began REALLY using the kindles for other subjects than reading.  Here are two practicing math facts during morning work time.

Long Division Tutorial

Today we began to divide using the Long Division algorithm-- or what I fondly call the "Old School" method.  In case you forget, here is the video tutorial.

Reading Workshop

I am so proud of the class this week during reading workshop. They were able to do many things at once without becoming distracted or getting off-task.  Today I was even able to go around the room and photograph what was going on!

Here's a group reading "How to Survive Middle School" on the iPad.

A student reading on his Kindle (and the student told me his mom just loaded him back up with books so he should be
all set for a week or so).

Some independent reading from a book he couldn't wait to finish (apparently it was getting good).

A pair doing some word work from The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg.

A student finishing up The Winter Room. 

Independent Word Work (I think it was math, but hey, there are words...)

Another student finishing up The Winter Room.

A student using the comfy chair and a quiet spot to read.  He said to me, "It's a pretty good book when you concentrate on it."   

Another quiet spot!  If I sat like this for an extended period of time, I am not sure I would be able to walk later.