More Time Chilling With Nanuq!

Today was one of those days that remind me why I love being a teacher.

We tuned in to Edmodo and Polar Bear International's webcast live from Churchill hosted by our new friend Andy McKiel. You could have heard a pin drop in this room if it weren't for the scratching of pencils on paper as the students madly wrote their facts and reflections about what they were learning. Everyone was totally engaged in the webcast and the learning that happened, the discussions that were sparked, was priceless. I have included some snaps of our reflections and discoveries that were recorded during the webcast in the animoto below. I wish I could post them all! Some kids even filled the back side of their paper, it was like their little minds were exploding with new information! This week we will be starting inquiry projects about severe weather and climate change, I am guessing there will be a lot of inquiring around our fresh interest in the Greenhouse Effect!
After watching the webcast, we read some of Andy's blog posts from his experience (awesome) and talked about his question, "If polar bears could talk, what would they say?" We also read "Winston of Churchill" which shares a lot of "polar bear opinion" to get our minds working. We had some great ideas about what polar bears would say and extended that to explain WHY they would say it. We posted our ideas as comments on Andy's blog and he replied to all of our questions! Check out our ideas and his responses.

Here are some of our facts, reflections, thoughts and sketches from what we learned today:

The topic of the webcast today was "Polar Detectives: Living In A Sustainable World" which talked a lot about climate change, fitting perfectly into the end of our weather exploration in Science! Below is the recording from today's webcast. Skip ahead to 9:25 for the beginning of the webcast. All of the webcasts from this week are embedded in the video page of Andy's blog if you would like to take a look.

The song that plays as you wait for the webcast to start is "The Polar Bear Song/Bjorn's Song":

Webcast (skip ahead to 9:25):

Watch live streaming video from tundraconnections at livestream.com

 

It was a great day in grade 5!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Plastic Bag Roundup Final Count

Are totall of plastic bag is 9410 plasic bags. I wish we could get more plastic bags but it is over so we can'tget more. If we reched are plastic bag gole of 10,00 plastic bags we mit get the plastic bag bench.It dupens if we have more plastic bags then some school. I think even if we dont get the plastic bench we can
-Kirstyn

Grade 5 did an amzing job with the Plastic Bag Roundup this year. We planned and advertised more than any other class I have had which made a big difference. Some students even made posters to post in the community at places like their post office box and Sobeys. I know for certain at least one person brought a giant bag of bags to our school because he saw the poster at Sobeys. He didn't even have any children in this school! Everyone was very tolerant of the constant mess of plastic bags floating around in our room and did a good job of working around them. We had one final delivery of bags today and some friendly grade 3 and 4 students helped count them at lunch while my students were at volleyball practice.
Our final count was 9410 which is JUST below our goal of 10 000. Last year at Bird's Hill School we collected 4800 so we nearly DOUBLED last year's collection. THIS IS AWESOME! That is a lot of bags we are keeping out of the landfill.
While the Plastic Bag Roundup is done for this year, that doesn't mean you should throw out your bags. Most grocery stores have a big plastic container at the front door where plastic bags are collected for recycling. Or, if you have a LARGE closet, you could save them for Plastic Bag Roundup 2012!
Oh, and our frisbees were delivered today! Each student in my class who participated in the project will get a frisbee and the rest will go to classrooms and the Phys Ed program.
Thanks for all the support!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Plastic Bags

At school we finished the plastic bag round up. Are total was 8910 plastic bags. We worked really hard on this BIG project. We had 30 garbage bags full of little plastic bags. Every day people kept bringing in bags to our room. Our goal was 10 000 bags. We were so close! We needed 1090 more bags to reach our goal. It was very fun to work on this year.

Madison and Jada

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 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