The students are finishing up their Magic Schoolbus at the Waterworks Vokis. They took on the role of one of the characters in Ms Fizzle’s class and wrote a script about their crazy day at the Waterworks. Using the school’s recordable iPods, they recorded themselves reading the script. After they made a Voki of the character, their voice was uploaded. It was a lot of fun and we learned many interesting facts about water! You can see the rest of our Vokis here.

Making Props for Rock Cycle Play

This week we’ve been working on our Rock Cycle projects. Most of the groups wrote plays about the rock cycle and Abby, Jack and Holly made a poster, wrote a quiz and made a crossword puzzle. Thomas made a 2-D comic strip and is working on a 3-D comic strip

Working on Costumes for the Play

Anna presented a Powerpoint about friends. We loved it!

Strong verbs have been our focus in writing. Inspired by Roald Dahl’s description of the giant peach rolling over all kinds of things in James and the Giant Peach, we wrote our own rolling object stories. Just like Roald Dahl, we worked on using strong verbs in our descriptions.

Writers at Work

We ended the week with the Marshmallow Challenge! Teams had to create the tallest structure possible out of 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string and a marshmallow on top. It was challenging!

This week, we finished the global read aloud book, Tuck Everlasting! We discussed the book with Mrs. McElroy’s 4th grade class from Georgia through Skype.We were wondering about the significance of the toad in the story. Grace thought the toad represented the circle of life. We also wondered if the toad could really drink the magical water through its skin. Aidan, our resident frog expert, assured us that yes, the toad could get water into its stomach through its skin.

Then we watched the movie, Tuck Everlasting. There were a lot of differences between the book and movie! Some of us liked parts of the book better and some of us liked changes made in the movie. We talked about the movie and book with each other and the Georgia students in Edmodo. We worked on quality responses and agreeing or disagreeing with others politely.

We also worked very hard writing letters to the students in Mrs. McElroy’s class. We made our own stationary and wrote our letters in our best handwriting. We hope they love our letters as much as we loved their letters to us!

We have had a busy 3-day week in 4P. We continued our study of rocks and minerals. We observed the properties of metamorphic rocks. Did you know that metamorphism means change in form?

We prepared clues for our Mystery State Skype call. We worked very hard to write clues that would not give our state away but would still teach our callers interesting facts about Connecticut.

Our Mystery State callers were from Michigan and they live right along Lake Michigan! They taught us great facts, too. Did you know that Derek Jeter is from Michigan?

Brady and Matthew presented special reports this week. We learned about snakes from Brady and statistics about the New Orlean’s Saints from Matthew. You can watch all of the 4P News Reports on our wiki!

After reading Mrs. Yollis’ class blog, we wrote word problems about Connecticut state symbols. Can you solve them?

Two oak trees were in a field. They were 50 feet tall. One was 25 feet taller. How many feet tall was each oak tree?

Two garnet minerals were buried 25 feet deep. One mineral was buried 5 feet deeper than the other. How many feet deep did each mineral go?

Two robins laid 28 eggs. One robin laid 4 more eggs than the other robin. How many eggs did each robin lay?

There were two Sperm whales. The two whales could jump 50 feet in the air. One whale could jump 10 more feet in the air than the other. How many feet did each whale jump?

Two Sperm whales ate 64 krill. One Sperm whale ate 12 more krill than the other. How much krill did each Sperm whale eat?

Two minerals weigh 50 pounds. One weighs 6 pounds more. How many pounds does each mineral weigh?

In the book Shredderman: Secret Identity, Nolan wanted to change the way the school bully, Bubba, was treating everyone. Nolan created a superhero secret identity, Shredderman, who fought for truth and justice, putting Bubba in his place.

After looking carefully at some examples of blogs, discussing how the content and look of each blog reveals what its author likes and cares about , we talked about ideas for personalizing our new class blog. We decided to use Thomas’ cool  idea, 4P Superheroes, for our theme. Just like Nolan, we each created our own superhero identity who fights to make the world a better place. After learning how to use the library catalog, we each found a book that our superhero would read. We filmed our superheroes flying or sitting in the sky, while reading a great book.

We hope you like our secret identities!

If you had a secret identity, what kind of superhero would you be?

What would your superhero fight for?

What kind of special powers would your superhero have?