September 28, 2012

       Did you know that Vikings didn't actually have horns on their helmets or that not every Viking's a blood thirsty tyrant? Vikings were mostly farmers and traders that lived in Scandinavia, which was built up with Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. They lived in barn like houses called 'halls' or 'longhouses' with their families and during the the winter they brought in their farm animals. Vikings did raid and kill though. They sailed to the to the coast of England and killed monks, took their treasures, and took some monks for slaves. This is what we learned about Vikings this week.

      This week we learned about the Newbery Award. Okay so you know that the Newbery award is for kids, right?  Well, kids have nothing to do with it.  It's really the librarians that pick the books.  We think that kids should actually have a say in it. It's not that grownups shouldn't be a part of it, but they see books differently than kids do.

This week in Social Studies we learned about Pangea, tectonic plates, and continental drift.  Pangea was the name of the continents on Earth when they were joined together.  A scientist named Alfred Wegner discovered this first, but no one believed him.  He had found a way to fit all the continents around Africa.  It turns out his theory was right.  Tectonic plates are ike bases under the continents.  These plates move about 3cm every five years.  These plates broke apart and the continents drifted apart.  This caused Australia to move towards the bottom of the world and change its climate.  The continental drift also caused certain crops to grow in one place and not another.  This is what we learned in Social Studies.

September 21, 2012

           This week in Science we did an Engineering Design Challenge.  Each table was a group.  Each group has 5 materials.  We had a ruler,4 balls,a container, a cup and a piece of chart paper.  Each group had to come up with a experiment to try and do with all materials.  We learned that we all have to agree on what to do so it doesn't end up in a big argument.

            This week in reading we learned about Greek and Latin word roots.   Did you know that the words predict, dictator, and dictionary all come from the Latin language? Dict means "to say." Also, the words microphone, microchip, and microscopic all come from he Greek language.  Micro means "small."  It was really interesting and loads of fun.  

            In reading this week we did prefixes and suffixes.A prefix is something that is at a beginning of a word .Here are some examples: so one is re in recycle or ly in quickly.Now lets talk about suffixes , suffixes are something you put at the end of a word to change its meaning and you can change it from one type of word to a different type of word.

September 14, 2012

                                                                     Reading
                         In reading we read a book called " The Man Who Walked Between the Towers". It was about a man who walked between the Twin Towers. It was a true story and the man's name was Philipe Petite  He laid on the cable,ran,jumped,walked,danced,and sat on the cable! He was a VERY brave man!
                          In science we are learning about physical science. In Technology we did a paper about what technology is and read a passage about toy ducks at sea.Toy ducks at sea is about how scientists and explorers discovered the oceans around the world.In the paper we had to do we had to circle the things we thought were technology and circle what technology is.
                       In social studies we did plenty of things.We were learning about longitude and latitude.How we learned about it was by checking each state and what there directions were.We also learned about the US Constitution and maps.