Vermont Geography and this week

     We have been very busy this week and working very hard trying finish up the Vermont Geography unit. On Monday, students made a salt and flour physical map of Vermont which included the mountain ranges.  Later, they added the lakes and rivers and then labeled everything. They brought the maps home yesterday to study for their regions and mountains test today. After vacation we will be starting a unit on Vermont history.

     We read about rocks and minerals that are in Vermont and learned about the rock cycle. Then students created metamorphic brownies. These are brownies that have things (chocolate chips, M & Ms, coconut, nuts) added to them with the pressure of a spoon. Heat is added to cook them and we look for changes of the ingredients in the brownie.  The important thing that they remember is that metamorphic rocks are created with heat and pressure and some things change and some do not.

    After learning about the rocks and minerals in Vermont we “mined” chocolate chip cookies with sticks, separating the M & Ms and chocolate chips from the sand (dough). Each of the ingredients represented different rocks and minerals. They had to calculate the value of their mine.  Finally, they had to try to put the cookie back the way it originally was and they realized that once extracted from the ground, it can never go back exactly the way it was.

     In other subjects, we finished the read aloud Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.  Throughout the book we explored his style of writing or the author’s craft, so that we could improve our own writing. For example, Gary Paulsen slows down a moment and lets the reader know what is happening before the main character knows or how he repeats words or lines or uses short sentences.

In math students took a pretest on the multiplication unit.  We are currently learning how to multiply a 3 or 4 digit number by a one digit number.

     We used the dictionary several times this week to learn about the various parts of a dictionary, the guide words and the definitions.

     In writing we have  been writing opinion pieces. We took one of our 7 opinion pieces, looked at the rubric and revised it. These were shared in a staff meeting as we are working schoolwide on writing persuasive pieces. Our next unit will be on report writing. Students did a pretest on Friday.  We will start working on the writing reports after vacation.

     On Friday we participated in the 5/6 Carnival games that they made in math. You can ask your child about them. We also heard a concert at the end of the day. It is a brass trio from the VSO. They will be performing many styles of music including ragtime, jazz, Dixieland and German oompah.