Free the Children

This year Bird's Hill School is one of the lucky Winnipeg schools that gets to be a We School. This means that we get to take 13 children in grade 6 to We Day at the MTS Centre on November 23. We will also work as a Youth in Action group of grade 5 and 6 students throughout the year who are interested in making the world a better place for children everywhere. Our Free the Children Club will be starting it's own blog and using digital media to raise awareness, spread the word, share our progress and gather feedback through comments. Stay tuned!

This Week at School

This week at school…

In science we watched more videos on YouTube. This time we were watching videos about air pressure.  There was a guy in Mexico and he had a watch to measure the pressure. He was down at sea level and the pressure was… I can’t remember sorry. When he was on the mountains there wasn’t that much pressure because it takes all the pressure away that you had on the beach.  

In Gym we did lots of volleyball. It was about learning how to bump and today we learned how to volley the volleyball. We played different volleyball games. Like: backyard clean up and keep up with a partner. Today Me Matt, Dawson, Nick M, Nick S, And Cam.

In Art we did silhouettes. STEPs: you colour the paper with paint in order yellow orange red purple blue black. Then you let it dry while it is drying you cut out your black shapes. When your picture is dry you glue your black cut outs to your paper and that is it. And that is how you make silhouettes.

This week in Math we did our math quiz. I think I did really well because on the pre-test I got it all right and I studied hard. In math otherwise we did estimates. It was hard because you were always trying to get the right answer. It was different

Mason

Sharing With Voki

Brooke finished her TWAS early and was exploring Voki. She created this clip about our day.



Halloween Silhouette Art

This week we created Halloween silhouette art as seen on ThatArtistWoman's Blog. She has so many fantastic ideas and explains them all step by step. After I used the Artsonia app to load our artwork to our student art gallery, I created an Animoto video of our art work using the Animoto app on my iPhone. It was so easy to do, the only hiccup was that I couldn't rotate the photos so some of them are sideways :( Check out our video...

Planning for 10 000 Day

Today we started planning for our 10 000 Day to celebrate having over 10 000 visitors to our blog. We brainstormed our ideas using linoit again. We are still looking for suggestions, leave us a comment with your ideas!
Here is what we have so far:



Last year's 100 Day shirt with 100 tallies



100 Day is always one of my favorite days to plan and have with young students. Everyone loves the activities that are all about counting, exploring 100, learning and having fun at the same time. I was disappointed to think that celebrating 100 day in grade 5 probably wouldn't happen so it was really exciting to discover we could have 10 000 Day. 10 000 is a totally different number to work with than 100, I don't think making a 10 000 Fruit Loop necklace would be a feasable as one with 100! And I won't be able to make a 10 000 shirt like I have for 100 Day with buttons and ribbon tallies. We will have to be creative, which makes it all the more interesting. In math we have been talking about large numbers and are now talking about estimating with large numbers which might come in handy when we are writing a story with 10 000 letters or words! Stay tuned to see how it all turns out!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

We Have Hit 10 000 Visitors!

I just noticed that we have reached 10 000 blog visitors! YAHOO! We are going to celebrate with a "10 000 Day" - stay tuned for details.
How do you think we should celebrate 10 000 blog visitors? Leave us a comment below with your suggestions.

Plastic Bag Assembly Production

Tomorrow we will be having an assembly and sharing our Plastic Bag Round Up project with the school. They know it is going on because we have talked about it, advertised it and sent notes home but we thought we should share our progress.
Last year my students and I created a video for this same purpose. When I showed it to grade 5 to kick off and explain our plastic bag project this year, they immediately wanted to make one of their own. I thought this was a great way to introduce Animoto so that the students could use it on their own in the future.
We took photos and video clips during each of our bag counting days and started putting the video together as a class. Today, we did some more detailed planning using linoit, digital sticky notes, which allowed us to organize our plans as we brainstormed. Here is our final linoit product.

Before we got to this point, we had brainstormed all the things that needed to be included in our video production. Once we had all the ideas down, we were able to move them into the order we wanted them incorporated and decide who would like to be recorded saying each one. Once this was done, we grouped the notes to show who would record whom and talked about video recording skills. (Boy, when I put it all down in detail, we got through a lot!) The students recorded each other on our Flip cameras and voila! Our production! (Well, not quite just voila. I am finishing it off in Animoto due to our deadline of tomorrow.) We will post the video once we have shared it with our school community.

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

More and More Bags!

Today we counted plastic bags for the second time. We have the system down to a science now which is great! One of our students had brought in five giant bags of bags that she had collected from a few sources so we were predicting whether or not we would have as many as we did last week (2600). The general consensus was "no".
After about an hour of counting we came to a surprising 2880! This brings our grand total to 5480. Wow! Keep it up.
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

The Faces of Five

I just added a photo to the right side bar of our blog. Since it is a little hard to see, I am posting it here as well. I made this using a very cool tool called Shape Collage which is exactly what it sounds like. A shape that is a collage of photos!
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Publishing With Book Creator

This week i finished my frist story in daily 5. So I got to publish it on the ipad. The ipad is from a group that Mrs.Dent Scarcello is in. I got to publish it on a app on the ipad called "Book creater". Book Creater is where you get to type your book, when you are publishing you get to put pictures in your book. Its very cool and when you are done your book it goes strate into "ibooks" (if you have it) but if you dont have it, it just stays in book creater. Book creater is a great way to share your storys and to get your friends to read them. I  love doing book creater and I can't wait to finish my other book in daily 5.

- Jada :)

New Netbooks!

Our school got all new computers last week including a mobile lab of 30 netbooks! We are the lucky ones that get to try them out first because our teacher got them organized. We are each going to comment on this post from our desks in our classroom!



- Mrs. Dent Scarcello's Class :)

The Big Black Fire.

There was a big black fire. It was by the Perimeter hwy off of Gunn and Redonda by the train tracks. It was grey from where I could see. I could only see the top of it. Now I will tell you a scary story of it. So kick your shoes off grab a snack and get comfy. Ready? Ok here I go.

On October 8th 2011 there was a fire. A horrible fire. We where leaving to go to chocolate factory( It is where you get to make chocolate stuff and eat it) When my brother said "what is that grey stuff over there?"
We all looked and it was smoke. So we said to are dad "can we go see?' So we had to put are windows up so the smoke wouldent come in.

We drove until the trains tracks.The rest of the road was blocked off. We saw a little path and fire cruse there. We looked up and saw BIG PUFFY CLOUDS of black smoke. Behind us was an abulance coming to the fire.There was a little office infront of the fire. They had to evacuate very soon before the fire got worse. Well there i said it, The fire got worse. There were people walking there to see what happend. People riding bikes there to see what happend. People in there cars to see what happend.

So we left because it was getting late. We went to the bank to get money and listen on the radio to see what happend. We can still see the fire. They said on the radio that they started to wrestle the fire at 5:00 in the morning and they said they have been fighting it for 8 and a half hours and they are still wrestling it. Wow that was a big fire.

We were driving home from the factory and got home at 5:30 in the afternoon and the fire was still going on. We had to leave to go somewhere else. We got back at night and the fire was still going on. They said on the radio the fire started with a gasoline truck tipping over. They wrestled it for like 10 hours and gave up. They were just going to let it burn until it was done. It was the biggest fire I have ever saw. It was very windy and it was blowing the fire the opposite way than us. But if it was blowing the way to us. We would have to evacuate.

That was my story about the fire. I hope you enjoyed it. And i have a question for you. What was the biggest fire you have ever seen? Thank you and have yourself a good day.

-Katie

My Fantistic TWAS

This week at school I got taught a new game called Banana grams. Banana grams is a game that 4 or 5 people can play and righ now I’m going to teach you how to play.


Step 1: flip over all tiles and then pick 21 if 4 but if 5 15.


Step 2: say “split” and the game starts and you are trying to make as may word or long words.


Step 3: say you have a Q or a V you can say “ Dump” and put the Q or the V goes into the pile and pick 3 new tiles but you don’t want to say “dump” all the time or you will end up with to much tiles.


Step 4: when your tiles are all gone you say “Split” then you win 
That is how you play Banana Grams

This week we did a french paper on Famous people. You had to cut Famous people out of magizene or on the computer. I cut people out of a magizene and i took Justin timberlake and Karry underwood.

But lots of people forgot to bring in pictures but Brook saved the day because she had a teen magizene so every buddy took pictures from brooks Book. anyway then you had to glue the pictures on the paper and write their names.

This week we started a plasic bag round up. Its when you have to collect all the plastic bags you can.

anyway me and Emily were parters so you have to take a bag and turn it inside out of no food or receipt or in the bag. Then you have to line them up in a row of 10 and Mrs. Dent scarcello puts a tally on the white borad. We have 2600 bags so far then round up ends on October 27 so bring all the bags you can. Adress #3950 raliegh St.

In daily 5 i am so close to be finshed my book on the ipad. My book is about my dog bening a super dog and his real sister Emma. My dogs name is Jumbo and he is a dashound i love my dog. I took pictures of my dog around my house on my ipod i also got pictures off the computer. Also in Daily 5 i am reading a book called Dork Diraies and its number 4. It came out on Tuesday afternoon. I just got it on October 13, 2011 or yesterday. I am really enjoying the book so far and i am on page 55.

By: Jada



Awesome Plastic Bag Round-Up

Today all the gread 5 class in mrs.dent scarsello class did the plastic bag round up in the class room. Im really glad that we got to do the plastic bag round up.What we are trying to do is get 40 or more plastic bags to make a frisbee for the school.Every 40 plastic bags is 1 frisbee for are the school. There are other schools doing the plastic bag round up. And the school that gets more plastic bags then us gets a plastic bag bench that got ricicled. the whole school gave us plastic bags from stores,home,antys,uncles gramas grampas and any one else you know.We all got up to 2600 plastic bags thanks to the people is birds hill school.The class tryed to gess the closest anser or the right anser to how many bags we got. And the one who was closest was jada was  the closest to the right anser. And what they are doing to the plastic bags is thay are recicleing  them all into frisbees.I hope we can do this a nother time Because it was really really fun to do at school today. We are not done yet, we still need your plastic bags!
-Kirstyn

The Manitoba Fires - How Big is it?

This morning Kayla brought in some info to share with the class about the fires that are burning in Manitoba. This sparked some interesting conversation and even started a little investigation we will share more about later. We are going to figure out what 18 000 hectares really looks like! So far we know that 18 000 hectares is the same as 18 000 000 meters squared. We drew 1 meter squared on the board so we could have a visual.
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

There was a fire that started in Nopiming provincial park.They say it started with grass brushing together but my tic toc Oma said that one of her friends said it started with lightning. I don't know whether to believe the global news on the computer or my tic toc Oma. I can't believe whats happening. But the wind is pushing it so it's spreading fast.

At first it was heading to beresford then the wind switched so now it's going the other way.There are 2 helicopters and more than 40 fire trucks . Right know we have allot of memerys in the cabin and pictures. My family is really worried about the cabin and uncle Walters cabin. Because he is re building his cabin.we were just there for thanks giving it's scary.

But if you type in fires in Nopiming provincial park you can find out the information I found out. The fire near bassette has grown to 18,000 hectares and is about 40 km long and 6 km wide.
-Kayla

PS - Kayla typed all this on my iPhone Blogger app! Way to go! She said her fingers are sore!