Mayport Naval Base

We had so much fun on our field trip to the Navy Base yesterday! Here is a peek at some of our adventures!

Field Trip!

Attention parents/guardians!

We are scheduled for our visit to Mayport Naval Base on Monday, January 26th. We are looking forward to some interesting tours including a live K9 demonstration and Helicopter viewing. Please remember to send your child to school with a bagged lunch. See you there!

(The bus leaves promptly at 9:00 a.m. and returns to school by 1:30 p.m.

Getting into Functional Writing!

We have now moved on to the 3rd 9 Weeks of school. Wow, time really does fly when you are having fun! We are beginning our genre study on procedural/functional writing. In other words, the students are learning to write "how to" papers. In class we have been focusing on the standards of functional writing and methods that can be used to meet the standards.

Some of the key elements in this type of writing include:

* The student establishes a context for the piece (engages the reader!)

* The student identifies the topic
* The student shows the steps in an action in enough detail
* The student includes relevant information
* The student uses language that is straightforward and clear; and
* The student uses pictures to illustrate the steps in the procedure.

We enjoyed practicing this process by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in class yesterday! Students were thrilled to put together their own creations in time for lunch. They then wrote about this in their journals--while including all of the ingredients and steps!

We look forward to making many other recipes throughout the upcoming weeks to tie together our math study of fractions and our "how to" study of functional writing! We anticipate making mini pizzas, pancakes, dirt pudding and brownies! A list will be sent home with the ingredients we will need if you are able to donate anything. After our cooking sessions, students will be making their own recipes. We will even be making paper mache' pinatas!! It is going to be such a fun time in writing this 9 weeks! Thanks for your support! We will post pictures as we enjoy the activities! ;)

Inauguration

We are learning in Social Studies about our new President! Today is Obama's inauguration.. We hope to watch clips of this process throughout the day. At this event, Obama will become the 44th president of the United States. He will also become the country's first African American president. Obama will make an oath, or promise, to protect the U.S. Constitution. Afterwards, there will be a big parade in Washington, D.C. Up to 5 million people are expected to attend! Following all of the events, the Obama family will move into the White House and begin their lives as the new first family!

Weighing Fruits

Thank you to everyone who brought in fruit for this lesson! We had a great time using it in our Math and Science lesson. Students learned how to weigh the fruit using gram stackers and a pan balance. We began the activity by finding out the initial weight of various fruit and recording it into a data table.

Next, we cut the fruit and left it exposed over night. The following morning, we found the fruit had begun to "rot" and "shrivel." Our predictions were that the juices would "evaporate" into the air and the fruit would weigh less. After testing our predictions by weighing the fruit again, we found that it "lost weight!" Shocking!! We were able to then form conclusions about fruit losing weight as it is exposed to air for a length of time. What a great activity!


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