What would you do if you were in charge of the world?

We ended our week with imagining what our world would be like if we were in charge... Some ideas were a little frightening while others were powerful ways to help our world! Slowly these poems will be added to our blog for you to enjoy! 

Sun Trackers

5S continued our exploration of shadows and the relationship between the earth and the sun.  We created sun trackers and went outside 4 times today to observe and track the shadows made by the sun (this activity closely relates to the Home School connection that was sent home yesterday).  Our focus question for the day was "what can be learned by tracking the length and direction of a shadow?"  See what your 5th grader thinks about the changing shadows we observed throughout the day today!

What would you create for a Smart City?

Ms. Slodounik, our gifted specialist, led our class in an activity today in Glenridge's new Makerspace.  This space will be used throughout the year by all grade levels to provide hands-on, creative ways to encourage students to design, experiment, build and invent as they collaborate and engage in science, engineering and tinkering.  Today, Ms. Slodounik facilitated the creation of a Smart City.   She provided the class with paper, scissors, tape, markers, and a small battery powered light bulb. The students were challenged to develop something that would add to the smart city and their creation had to include the light bulb in a purposeful manner.  Students jumped right in to the project, brainstorming ideas, connecting designs, pushing each other to think outside of the box, and inspiring unique designs.  When someone was in need of help or frustrated with the progress of his/her design, classmates stepped up to provide the needed support.  In the end, everyone successfully created an addition to a Smart City!

Building our Community Through Engineering

The Challenge: Work in a small group to build the tallest tower only using two pieces of paper, five paper clips, and one pair of scissors. 
The Goal: Learn about each other through problem solving, develop new friendships, celebrate and use the talents of each group member.
The Result: All 5th graders were successful!

How and Why do our Shadows Change Throughout the Day?

It was the perfect sunny day for us to start our astronomy unit by studying how our shadows change throughout the day.  Students worked in pairs to outline their shadows at about noon today and completed several shadow challenges (ask your 5th grader to tell you about a shadow challenge they attempted today).  Before we went out to observe our shadows 3 hours later we made predictions about what we thought we should see - many of us were quite surprised by the change! 

Diving in to Reading

To kick-off our year as voracious readers, we watched a short film titled, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," and explored the entire collection of books we have in our classroom library.  The short film celebrates the power of books - if you have not seem this film yet, I highly encourage you to watch it!  It is a magical story told without words.  As students explored the books in the classroom library, excitement and enthusiasm towards books erupted; we all found favorite books within the mix as well as captivating new books to try.  We are looking forward to the books we will share together this year!

Meet The 5S Community

The first day of school was a hit!  We worked hard to get to know each other as a 5th grade class and build our community so that we can feel safe and motivated to take risks and grow as learners.  Take a look at our happy and silly faces from this first day.