Free Rice

Fifth graders spent some time this week practicing vocabulary at the Free Rice website. For each correct answer to a vocabulary question, grains of rice are donated to United Nations World Food Program. By our calculations, in the few minutes they worked at the website, fifth graders donated 18,770 grains of rice. It's a nice example of people helping people via the internet.

Fourth Grade Hopes & Dreams

This term, fourth graders have worked on defining their hopes and dreams for the school year. In the process, we explored themes of copyright and fair use of images and learned to create a presentation using Google Docs for Education.

Ladybug Book #6 : Blackout

This picture book tells the story of a city family who experiences a loss of electrical power on a hot summer night. Many of the details of the story were taken from the experiences of New Yorkers the night of the Northeast blackout of 2003, as shown in this book trailer.

When asked what they would do to entertain themselves if the power went out, first graders responded:

Use the iPad.
Play a board game.
Play with a friend.
Color a picture. 
Dress up. 
Swim in your pool if it was summer. 
Use a headlamp. 
Play with a remote control vehicle if the batteries work. 
Play with your toys. 
Jump rope.
Sit in a circle and tell spooky stories with a flashlight.
Read at books and learn from it.
Go bike riding by the headlights of your car.

The beautiful illustrations from this book have already won a 2012 Caldecott Award! Maybe it will win the Ladybug Award, too!

Ladybug Nominee #5: Stars

Stars is a beautifully illustrated book by Mary Lyn Ray, a popular children's author who lives in New Hampshire, in Danbury! Some children remembered that she was a visitor to our school just last year. The illustrator is Marla Frazee, who has won several awards for her artwork in children's books.

After reading about Stars, first and second graders looked at Starfall, a website for young readers. We read an online book there called Pumpkin, Pumpkin and observed in the photos that pumpkin blossoms do look like stars, just as Mary Lyn Ray wrote in her book!

Many of us hope that Stars wins the Ladybug Award because Mary Lyn Ray would not have to travel very far to pick up her trophy!

Ladybug Nominnee #4: Neville

Poor Neville. His family moves to a new house in a new neighborhood and he has lost all his friends. Ask your student to explain the creative way Neville solves this problem and makes many new friends in a very short period of time! In several classes, there was great debate about whether Neville was being honest!

At one point, Neville "walks around the block" in his new neighborhood. We turned to GoogleMaps and annotated an image of Bristol to better understand this concept - because New Hampton doesn't have many neighborhood blocks!  Do you see the streets that Neville could have walked around? Students found lots of reasons why that would be called a "block"!

One student suggested that the fleet of yellow school busses looked like sticks of butter! We equated this view of town to what a bird must see as he flies over!

Hopes & Dreams

Both fourth and fifth graders are composing hopes and dreams for this new school year. Students are word-processing these statements in GoogleDocs (now GoogleDrive), making corrections and revisions as they type. Fourth graders will make a small Google Presentation slide show featuring their hopes and dreams, while fifth graders will use a password-protected educational edition of Glogster and will compose their hopes and dreams on a digital poster of sorts. These projects will be stored in the child's digital portfolio here at school.

Ladybug Nominee #3: Calvin Can't Fly

Calvin Can't Fly is a story about a starling who would rather read books than learn to fly. When the time comes for his flock to migrate, Calvin needs the help of his family to follow along. But Calvin's knowledge ends up saving the flock from  a great disaster. Children loved the ending of this Ladybug nominated book!

See the flock of starlings on the cover of the book? Here's a video showing how starlings like Calvin and his family swarm and swoop as a group. How do they do that?