Life Science

Our Triops are growing so fast.  We have three Triops that are about an inch long each and one Fairy Shrimp swimming in the tank.  Today, our class read about three classifications of plants; flowering plants, conifers, and ferns.  We then went outside and used our collection containers to collect samples of each.  We even saw a Garter snake along the way.
On Friday, our class will be visiting the Frog Pond (behind Shedd Park) to observe local animals and collect live specimens to observe in class.  We hope to find tadpoles, snails, and maybe some small frogs.

In Memory of Furball

Sadly, our caterpillar Furball passed away during school vacation.  He is missed in our classroom.

Triops

Our class also has several other pets, they are called Triops.  Triops are descendents of the Trilobites that lived during prehistoric times.  They are crustaceans (like lobsters and crabs).  Our Triops just hatched this morning and they are too small to be seen with our web camera.  Right now they are translucent and only one centimeter long.  We will post pictures as they get larger.

Furball

Our classroom has a new pet.  Her (or his, we are not sure) name is Furball.  Her whole name is Princess Furball Adjustment.  Furball is a "Wooly Bear" caterpillar.  She will become a Tiger Moth.  Students in our classroom have been bringing in fresh green grass for Furball to eat and sticks for her to climb on.

We made it through

The 5th grade Language Arts MCAS is over.  We made it through.  Next week we will continue our work on preparing for the math and science MCAS testing that will happen in May.  We will also finish our Physical Science unit next week and begin the Life Science unit in April.  Happy Spring.

Poetry Unit beginning

Next week, our class will begin reading and writing poetry.  We will post some of our poetry when it is ready.  In the meantime, you can find some really funny poems at http://www.poetry4kids.com

MCAS Prep Workshops

Our class has spent the last couple of weeks working on improving our responses to Open Response questions on the MCAS.  Our students have been reading prompts from past MCAS tests, TTQA to create a topic sentence, and using the Blueprint for Reading and Writing from our Language! Program to write a quality response.  When students are finished writing their responses, they self-assess by reading the exemplars and rating their responses on a scale of 0-4.

We are posting our quality responses on our "Show Me a 4" board pictured above.