Fit and Fun!

On Friday, November 8 students and teachers at Bear Creek celebrated their school spirit with Fitness Day. Everybody wore their best workout gear, and we even headed outside for a little fitness session. We did exercises, team-building activities, and we ended with a running race for those who wanted to participate. Check out their pictures of our class and Mrs. Towsen's class enjoying our exercises!

Synthesizing

The more we talk about our reading strategies, the more we realize that actually all of the reading strategies go together. Let's look at synthesizing. Technically synthesizing means that you take the information you read and see if it makes you change your thinking from before you started to read. But here's what we realized!

• This is actually the same as making a prediction. You think about what the story will be about before you read, and then you see if you are correct while you read. If you are, you keep going. If not, you change your prediction!
• It's also just like noting details because we're looking for important information that tells us whether our thinking was correct or incorrect.
• It's also just like summarizing because you have to take what you've learned and put it into your own words to make sure you understood it.
• And along the way you ask questions about thing you didn't understand or facts you want to know more about!

So maybe they call the skill synthesizing, but really it's just using ALL of the reading strategies at the same time! If you take a look at the pictures below, you'll see how we synthesized information to learn about a capybara. If you've never seen a capybara, we've included a photo of one at the end. What something you have read about and the reading changed your thinking or helped you learn something new? Please leave a comment and tell us all about it!

This was our thinking about capybaras before we did any reading.

As we read we recorded important details that we learned, and we talked about some new vocabulary.

We summarized what we learned to show how differently our thinking is now that we've read.

A capybara
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wet-capyvara-in-Brazil.jpg

Exploring Science Tools

As we wrapped up our study and summary of the scientific process, we had the chance to go to the lab and try out many of the different tools that scientists use as they work through experiments. During our lab time we had the chance to use all of the different tools that are on our study sheet. From trundle wheels to microscopes, graduated cylinders to thermometers, we experienced how tricky it can be for scientists to be precise and measure things accurately. Check out the pictures of us using the tools of scientists!

Celebrating Wackiness!

Today it was Wacky Hair Day at Bear Creek, and boy oh boy, did Team Kit Kat ever show off their school spirit! We are definitely Bear Creek Proud! I hope everybody who is going out tonight has a safe, fun evening, and we hope you enjoy some laughs courtesy of our Wacky Hair. :)

A Special Social Studies Visit

Over the course of the last month we have been learning all sorts of different map skills. We've talked about hemispheres, lines of latitude and longitude, locations of continents and oceans, and map scale. While we've been talking about how these skills will help us in real life, yesterday we had a chance to really make our map skills come alive.

Lauren's mom, who works at the State Museum in Harrisburg (where we are going for our field trip!), brought in a 20 foot by 30 foot map of the state of Pennsylvania. This map had a compass rose, lines of latitude and longitude, a scale, a grid, cities, counties, county seats, rivers, and landforms. We talked about so many different things that we could learn from this map. We discovered that most people in Pennsylvania live in the southeastern corner of the state, and that is where the best farming land is found. In the northwestern corner of the state there are not many people, but there are many mountains, forests, and wild animals to enjoy.

Kids from our class and Mrs. Towsen's class had the chance to locate the different parts of the map, use the scale to find out it's about 300 miles from Erie to Philadelphia, and use the grid to find some of Pennsylvania's cities and important highways. At the end of the presentation partners and groups of three each got an animal that was native to Pennsylvania and had to find its habitat on the map. We had to work together to use our map skills to correctly place all of our animals.

We really appreciated that Lauren's mom was willing to take time out of her day to come in and show us how we can apply map skills in a different way. We are looking forward to having her come back to make Pennsylvania's history come alive!

Harlem Globetrotters

On October 9 the students at Bear Creek were treated to an amazing display of basketball skills and some great lessons on standing up to bullies. Handles Franklin, who is originally from Harriburg, PA, showed off his basketball talents by doing amazing spins, dribbles, and shots.

While he was mesmerizing us with his skills Handles also shared some ABCs of bullying and how to reach your dreams. The ABCs of bullying are:

• A - Action - take action to be kind and caring to people; take action by telling adults when you see bullying happening
• B - Bravery - be brave when you see bullying and stand up for those people who are being bullied
• C - Compassion - care about all people and always do the right thing

Handles shared that he had ALWAYS wanted to be a part of the Globetrotters team after he saw them when he was a little kid, and with hard work and perseverance he reached his dream. He encouraged all of the students at Bear Creek to work hard, believe in themselves, and never give up on a dream. 

We all enjoyed seeing Handles and hearing his message, and we hope he has a great season with the Globetrotters!

Our Science Experiments

Last week you got to see how we've been learning about the scientific process. Now we want to share the results of our own science experiments! Our groups chose the following materials to redo the paperclip experiment:

• push pins
• staples
• bingo chips
• small letter tiles
• fat letter tiles
• dice
• small snap cubes

Some of the information for our experiment paper was filled in, but we had to complete some of the parts ourselves. We had to make observations about our materials, ask questions, and come up with a hypothesis about how many items will make the cup overflow. During the experiment we had to carefully keep track of how many things we added to the cup, and then we had to talk about our results and tell what we learned. It was exciting to see how many items it took, and we're still thinking about why we got the results we did. We're excited to continue using the scientific process to do other experiments this year.

Take a look at these pictures of us writing our responses and carrying out our experiments!