Thursday, March 7, 2013

4th Grade - Today's vocabulary word was Swelter which means oppressed by heat. Their explorer was Thomas Jefferson who authored the Declaration of Independence. They played 20 Questions for their warm-up activity. The affective lesson focused on Courage. created a shield that represented themselves and a courageous act they completed. After learning about hunger in other parts of the world, students developed healthy menus based on the USDA's new food plate (previously known as the food pyramid).

5th Grade - These students had two vocabulary words: Acclaim which means enthusiastic public praise and approval, and Innate which means possessed at birth, inborn, a natural characteristic. Their explorer was Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the radio (not the telegraph as originally reported in this blog). The affective lessons covered  how to be prepared for a "sticky" situation, things they don't want their children to face, manners and reasons to be proud of yourself. Students were introduced to the Industrial Revolution. After reading the literature about a particular aspect of the Industrial Revolution, students created a product and shared what they learned with their classmates.

One student chose to write a blog entry. Here is her project:

Ring,Ring! Today, it seems every person has a smartphone. Apple, Android, Google, Samsung. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since the late 1800s. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, I’m sure he didn’t think about where it would be in a hundred years: I’m the hands of millions of people. In 2000, 100 million people had wireless phones. One of the first commercially available phones was the TAT-1. If you adults remember the clunky phones from when you were a child, it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine a bigger phone from 1899. Dial phones have been around just as long. TEENSY TIDBIT: The 1^st three digits in a phone number stand for your area. The next three stand for I-have-no-clue, and the last four represent your land numbers. The loading coils were first used commercially in New York. Did you know that the world’s longest telephone line has 2,500 TONS of copper in it? So next time you tell your son/daughter to get off the phone, take a moment to thank modern technology for better communication.