Silent Hallway Drag Race

We are nearing the end of our Motion and Design unit.  In our unit we have learned many different ways that a vehicle is capable of moving.  Our most current way to have a vehicle move from point A to point B is using a propulsion unit...in this case a rubber band wound around a free spinning axle, while the other end is attached to a fixed axle sent our vehicles flying.  To put our vehicles into action, and for a little competition, we had a "Silent Drag Race" in our hallway.  The car that traveled the shortest distance was eliminated from competition until only one car remained.  Check out our race:

Stepping Stones in Our Classroom

The following is a quick video showing what our class so far has enjoyed about our new Stepping Stones math curriculum.  In the video you will hear from several students about how they think about math and learn about our Think Tanks.

Winter Sing Along a Success!

Our students put on a great winter sing along this year.  They definitely have us in the spirit for the holidays.  Enjoy the pics and sounds!

3 x 6 Writing Slam

In writing yesterday we had some fun with spontaneous writing.  We did a "3 x 6 Writing Slam."  Students were given a silly sentence starter.  In this case, the sentence was "'Quick, over here!' said the caveman as he tumbled over the waterfall."  All of my students had to start their story with this sentence.  They then had 3 minutes to write as much of their story as possible.  When the three minutes was up, they had to stop (finish the word they were on) and rotate to the next person's story.  They had 30 seconds to read and then 3 minutes to write.  We did this rotation six times until they got back to their original piece.  Today, students will practice editing the story on their own.

Check out the video to get an idea of how our class looked/functioned....

Motion and Design with Google Spreadsheet

Our current science curriculum is "Motion and Design" through the Einstein Project.  In this kit our students get hands on experience learning about how and why vehicles move the way they do.  We spend time learning about Newton's Three Laws of Motion as well.  

This year I have been trying to incorporate more Google Drive tools, especially when opportunities arise to use Google Spreadsheet.  In our most recent lesson, students had to learn how an unbalanced force effected their vehicles' movement.  In this case, the unbalanced force was washers.  At first, their vehicles did not move with small amounts of washers, but eventually, as you will see below, they got their vehicles moving very fast.  The faster their vehicles went in combination with the washers hitting the ground, made actually seeing inertia (vehicle moving without a force acting on it) possible.  

While students made these observations, they also collected data on a Google Spreadsheet.  The spreadsheets were simple, three column, designs.  With their data, students quickly created graphs showing their results with basically one click of a button.  This was a fun, simple, and quick way to collect and analyze data in our fifth grade classroom.