Wow, what an amazing Spring Program performance of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" - way to go, Room 204! Check out some of the amazing photos taken by William's mom, Jean using the Google Drive link below. link: Spring Program Photos
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I'm Janani, and I am going to tell you about our last history project. One of the amazing things we did this week was the "African PBL". The African PBL was a group of people who worked on exhibits about the Early African Kingdoms. The groups were: Group one: Lillian, Clarina, William, and Maya. Group two: Amy, Viraja, Matt, and Pranav. Group three: Janani, Dhyan, Pratulya, and Emily. Group four: Akhilesh, Felicia, Vishnu, and Nikki. Group five: Aditi, Sidharth, Chloe, and Anirudh. For each group there were four jobs: Group Leader, Historical Expert, Artifact Manager, and Engineer/Architect. We had five learning targets. The driving question was: How did African Kingdoms rise and fall from their Golden Age, and what lessons can we learn from what happened? First we had to learn about the kingdoms and analyze common ways in which they rose and fell to power, like controlling trade routes helped them grow and being conquered by neighboring tribes meant they lost power. The cool thing was that everyone had different kinds of exhibits. Some people used scrolls, some used tri-folds, some used computers, and some used cardboard. Groups also made artifacts to represent the kingdoms during their Golden Age. At the end we got to see every group's exhibit and we had a curator to answer questions. In our art project we made ceremonial African masks for different purposes, like war masks or celebration masks. Some people showed anger, while others showed happiness. We learned that colors and shapes show the feeling of the person wearing the mask. We learned that down or slit eyes can show anger. Flared noses may show anger, but some times they show humor. Wide eyes can use the feeling of being surprised. At the end all of the masks (that were made of plates for the base) we all enjoyed the way they looked after they were hung up on the walls. Hi! My name is Aditi. I am the blog author for this week. On April 12 ,2019, we had our Medieval feast! First we had a knighting ceremony. If you were a knight, you would stand up to recite vows and after, walk up to the stage as you were announced. If you were nobility, then you would also be announced to come onto the stage. When you were on the stage, the king would knight you with his sword and you would be the knight. Next, came the fun stuff: FEASTING! To get our food we had to stand in a line and walk down the food stations. The food was served by the awesome parent helpers. The food included fruits, pastries, goldfish, and chicken nuggets. Once we got our food we were seated at our tables. At the tables there were ring pops ! Everyone enjoyed the delicious treats while watching some performers entertain us. We enjoyed card tricks, singing, and singing. I think this was the best way to start our spring break. The experience was awesome. For our final project in the study of Islam and its origins, we created a "blog" from the perspective of a photojournalist visiting Mecca to learn more about the Islamic religion and culture. Check out our creative blogs with photos of our journey to the holiest city in Islam: Mecca!
Hello! My name is Emily. I am the blog author for this week's blog. I am going to tell you about an important thing we did this week. We had our Science Fair! Hooray! The people in our class put a great effort into this and had been preparing for months for this day to come. We started last October by thinking of an investigative question, doing background research, and creating a procedure and list of materials. Then, earlier this year we conducted the experiments and wrote about the results and conclusion. We were all showing GRIT and had a spectacular time preparing and doing this. Some people even got 20 or more people exploring and asking them questions about their experiment. The Science Fair boards look awesome and everyone had unique experiments. Having a Science Fair experiment all by yourself is hard to do but we all rocked it! We choose to do these experiments to learn about science and engineering more in a fun way. We learned about what the scientific method is. It is: ask a question, make a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, collect data, analyze information, and report results. We did all of these things with GRIT. None of us just gave up and said that they didn't want to do anymore of this or give up. We had this amazing science fair in the multi-purpose room. Some people got Ms. Deshmukh to watch their science fair project, like me. The surprising thing was that some people even got Mr. Dolan to look at their board! The Science Fair was the best thing ever this year! Let's look forward to the fair next year. It's going to get better. Down below are some awesome pictures of all the hard work we put into our boards and what we did. Enjoy! Bye! Oh and by the way, be proud of your hard work! Hi! My name is Akhilesh and I am going to tell you about our castle build last week. We have been learning about Medieval times, especially about castles and how they were used as a fortress and place of living for nobles. For our build, we gathered recyclable items for weeks. If we had extra recyclables we could use them as extra materials so we wouldn't run out. On the day of the build, we had to make a rough design of the castles, which is the planning and design step of the engineering design process. The designing was simple. It was just a bird's-eye view of where we were going to place things, labels of the castle parts, and what materials we were going to use. Then, we got to build the castles, but there were some difficulties. Some of the difficulties we faced were making a working drawbridge. Most people made it connected to strings and pulling and pushing the strings up and down to make the drawbridge move. Some other challenges we faced were getting the curtains to stay down with the tacky glue so we used hot glue if we couldn't get things to stay down. We learned about an engineering trick called an "elbow" that is a bent piece of material used to attach two walls (pictured in the slideshow). After we finished our castles, we got to label and decorate our castles. When we were done decorating and labeling our castles, we got to take them home. There are some amazing pictures below! Creating our castlesThe final productsThis week was Career Week at Stratford. We created a class Google Slides presentation on the jobs and careers we are interested in. First, we explored different fields that we were interested in choosing as a future career. We then researched one of the jobs and found important information like the salary, daily responsibilities and tasks, and amount of education needed. Here is a link to our slides! Check it out!
Hi, my name is Maya and I am going to tell you about the Medieval Europe activities that we have done so far in the bad class! One thing we did was create a personal Coat of Arms. What we did for that was took sheets of paper that had printouts of a coat of arms and drew and colored what represented our family and ourselves. Another thing we did was when we did a stimulation of being monks called Monk Day. We had to stay quiet for an hour and 15 minutes while we created illuminated letters, just like how the monks would copy books and the Bible in complete silence. On another day, we used "quills" and ink to write in Medieval calligraphy. We also did a simulation on the feudal system in which we had to give our hard earned M&Ms to our king and nobles if we were serfs. These are a few things we did in class. As promised in the last post, here are the photos from our amazing experience dissecting animal hearts. We were amazed to see the parts of the heart and how the chambers and valves connected in real life. Science is awesome! Check out some of our class activities learning about the circulatory system - the heart, blood, and blood vessels do important work! We created models of the heart's chambers, valves, arteries and veins to better understand how blood flows through the heart. Then we learned how to find pulse during various activities using a pulse-o-meter - we even "flossed" to learn how our heart rate changes with activity! We also "drank blood!" Not really. We used food items to represent the four components of blood: red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma - then we drank it! We're vampires! |
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May 2019
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