Harris Hillman, Equations, and Crickets - Oh My!

It has been a fun-filled week. The students are super excited about their upcoming trip to Harris Hillman. Any free moment they get, they are getting with their groups to work on their music/dance/skit routines. We have four groups in our class and the songs they have picked are: Smooth Criminal, You Belong with Me, Celebration, and Let's Get Crazy. I will post a slide show with some photos from their practices very soon. The students are welcome to bring props, costumes, etc. to school to help them practice. The students may also need to work together outside of school before the October 13th trip. This is not required, but I have been told that it has been a very common practice in years past. I have made the students aware that they should plan ahead and not try to organize an after school meeting the day of said meeting. Here are the rest of this week's highlights:

Math
As you should know, we have spent this week working with phrases and equations. I LOVE teaching algebra. It is so much fun to isolate variables and balance equations. We did a lot of work with finding the value of phrases and setting up equations to continue patterns. Unfortunately, we were not able to complete the football rankings this week, but they will back next week. Next week we are going to do more work with statistics and learn about mean, median, range, and mode. In addition to the previously mentioned skills, we have also spent some time working on basic facts. I am asking that all students continue to practice their addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts as much as possible. I am adding some new links to the blog. These links are to math sites that might be a fun way for your child to work on their facts. Be sure to check them out.

Science
Crickets were the focus this week. The students did really well creating Venn Diagrams to compare and contrast isopods and crickets. I loved watching how excited they were to observe the crickets through their hand lenses. It was great to see them identifying the parts of the cricket and asking questions about its behavior. This week we also began to work on a new inquiry project. We have four groups in each class that will be setting up the following experiments:
* Does amount of water affect growth rate?
* Does type of liquid affect growth rate?
* Does type of light affect growth rate?
* Does amount of light affect growth rate?
* Does water temperature affect growth rate?
* Does type of soil affect growth rate?
These projects are designed to have the children learn about the scientific process through actually experiencing it, rather than reading about it in a book. They learned a great deal from the paper airplane projects and I can't wait to see what they learn by doing the previously mentioned experiments.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend!