History Comes to Life

Today our class had the exciting opportunity to visit the 6th grade students' Living Museum. The 6th grade students have been working very hard to learn about an important individual from ancient history. Today each student had the opportunity to be an exhibit in a very unique museum.

As we walked up into the main hallway, we saw many different kids dressed in costume and standing perfectly still. We were in groups, and each group had 6 tickets. Our groups walked up to the person and put our ticket in their cup. As soon as we did that they person came back to life and told us all about themselves and what life was like when they were alive.

We liked the living museum for a lot of different reasons. Some of us like the kids' costumes. Ian thought that the props were really cool, especially when the person acted out something with his or her props. Makenna really liked that, unlike a regular museum, these people came to life and you could actually learn all about them by listening to them instead of just looking at them. Several people talked about the interesting facts they learned as they listened. Lydia really liked the costumes, as did many other kids. You can see some of what we experienced in the slideshow below.

Our class was VERY impressed by the 6th graders. It was obvious that they worked very hard to learn their about their people and spent a lot of time perfecting their speeches so they could do it for us today. Congratulations to the 6th graders, and thank you for inviting us to come to your museum!

Exercise, Enterprise and Animals!

It has been another busy week in the Bair's Den! We started off on Monday with our first intermediate field day. This day long event, similar to a track meet, is part of the Phys Ed curriculum. Ms. Shenk and Mr. Klose, along with many parent volunteers, work very hard to make this day a success. While it was VERY confusing at first, once we got into the swing of things we were all able to find our events, and many kids in our class earned many different ribbons. You can check out Ms. Shenk's website for a slideshow of our day.

Tuesday we were back into the swing of things, but there was no slowing us down. Since everybody finished their state research it was time to get into our regions groups and start synthesizing the information to create projects about the 5 regions of the United States. Groups of two or three got right to work combing the information from all of the states in the region to come up with a summary about one of six topics: location, physical features, climate, natural resources, industries and culture information. You can see from these pictures our teams were working VERY hard!

Wednesday, we celebrated the end of our 4th Junior Achievement sessions by simulating what it's like to have a world-wide supply chain. We used our supply chain to build a computer, and we had to figure out what to do when our one supplier was having a strike and couldn't get us the part we needed. During the past 5 weeks, Mrs. Kimball, our JA volunteer from Hershey's Foods, did an excellent job teaching us about entrepreneurship and running a business. We also appreciated the fact that she brought us yummy treats from Hershey each time she visited! Thanks, Mrs. Kimball, for a job well done!

Our busy week continued on Thursday when we took a short walk to the Fairgrounds for a presentation by the high school agriculture students. We visited 10 stations, and the high school kids did a great job teaching us about large and small animals, agricultural businesses, machinery and our environment. We're so lucky to have high school students that care enough about our community that they are willing to do so much extra work to teach us about things they enjoy. Check out the slideshow of our morning at the Fairgrounds!

State Presentations

We've been doing a lot of work that combines reading, writing and social studies to learn about the different states in the US. As a wrap up to this part of our US Regions Unit each student wrote a speech asking you to vote for their state as the best state. Check out our class blog to see how to read the speeches and vote for your favorite.

In addition to this writing piece, some of the kids also asked to create presentations using Google drive. Here's one example:




You can check out other presentations by visiting our student blogs!

Forces, Motion and Mystery Skypes

This week we've been working on understanding forces and motion. Motion is any movement that changes an object's position or place. A force is a push or a pull that makes motion happen. To get a first hand look at forces and motion in action, we headed out to the playground and made hypotheses about which forces and motions applied to each piece of playground equipment. As we learn more about the different forces and motions, we'll go back to our hypotheses to see if they are correct.

We also had two more Mystery Skypes, one of which was our very first International Mystery Skype! We connected with a class from Alberta, Canada! They go to a school that has students from grades 5 - 12, and there are only 400 students in their school. The kids said they don't have many industries in their area, but they do have lots of farms and ranches. They were also jealous that we were getting out of school, and they had two more hours to go because of the time difference! It was a very exciting experience.

Check out the videos of our last two Skype sessions!