Woo Hoo!

Enjoy the long break and looking forward to hearing about everyone's adventures when we're back together in the new year.

Happy Everything and Merry Always!

Meaghan and Alexa's Weekly Update...

Hello, this is Agent Meaghan and Agent Alexa reporting from Mrs.Clayton’s class. We have found many amazing things that happened to them in their amazing week. First, they had their Science Test, Then on Thursday, they had art. Last but definitely not least, they had an amazing PJ Day on the last day before break! Hope you guys enjoy our Weekly Update and have an awesome Winter Break! Agent Meaghan Out! This week, in Science we had a Test and finished up our third topic. Our third investigation  was called Fizz Quiz and I think it was the best so far! We have been learning about chemical reactions and chemical equations. We got to test out all sorts of things like mixing baking soda, citric acid, calcium chloride and water together in a bag. The bag blew up with  carbon dioxide and it created a precipitate. We also put baking soda and calcium chloride in a bag and that made a precipitate of calcium carbonate (calcium carbonate is chalk). The Chemical Equations were really fun too! It was fun to learn all the chemical names of items all around us. Next semester, it won’t be science, but it will be Social Studies! This week, we had Art. Most people have finished their Singapore shophouses and pasta boxes. The pasta boxes could get colored with spray paint and glitter if you wanted them spray painted. The Singapore shophouses were fun to make and paint. A shophouse is a shop at the bottom and a house on top and sometimes there are even three floors if you are a rich person. You can even give your pasta box and your singapore shophouse to your parents! Agent Alexa gave her dad her pasta box and her mom her shophouse. I had a bunch of fun making both projects and I am giving my mom my pasta box! This week, we finished our Non-Fiction writing piece. It was fun to gather all of the information. I can’t wait to see what all of the kids wrote about! I bet that all of us (students) thought that research was boring before we started. When we actually started researching, I think that all the kids got even more interested in the topic that they picked. It was really fun to search for books and on the internet for our topics. I (Alexa)had a bunch of fun going on the internet to research more about sloths! I can’t wait to see everyone else's!

On the last day before the winter break, we had our AMAZING PJ day! Since it is the last day of school before break, we got to play dodgeball with Mr.Clayton, Mrs.Clayton’s husband. We also had our second Rock Star Mall! There was a bunch of new stuff and some old stuff at the mall. You can check out what was popular with everyone at the Rock Star Mall by checking Alyssa’s Economist report. I bet Candy was high up on that list! I got 2 pieces of candy! At the end of the day we had our party! We watched A Christmas Carol. While we were watching we got to shop at the mall and drink hot cocoa. We also got to have some yummy treats like special cake pops and we got candy canes and popcorn too! Agent Meaghan and I hope that you have enjoyed our Weekly Update! Sadly, this is the last one. In January, we will have another amazing pair of Agents writing about Mrs.Clayton’s class and what they are doing then! We hope you have a wonderful, wacky, and wondrous Winter Break! Let’s welcome our new student…Alexander! Agent Meaghan and Alexa out!

Thinking Back on Science...

A LOT of learning was done during our Science Unit.  Although we're done with the investigations, there's still just one last bit of learning, and it's an important one.  Tonight's home learning is to reflect on all the thinking and discovering and questioning and learning you've done over the last few months.  In other words, it's time to METACOGNATE!

Here are some questions to get you thinking!

What new skills have you learned?

What did you learn about working together with lab partners/groups?

What worked and what didn't work for you?

What connections did you make?

How was your thinking pushed?

What did you enjoy and why?

Would you have done anything differently?
Favorite experiment?  What made it so gooood?
Least favorite or most difficult?  What did you learn from it?
Was there anything you could've improved on?
Questions you still have unanswered?

Batik Kaleidoscope Artwork

Check out the amazing Batik Kaleidoscope artwork our class created.  I'll bet some of these are going to be gifts for family members over the holidays.  Lucky them!

A Comma Story

What a nice little comma she is.   I hope this story helps some of you that are struggling with where to put those commas!

Rock Star of the Week, Greg!

Greg's Rock Star Wordle

Mychal and Luis' Weekly Update

In a galaxy far far away in Mrs.Clayton’s class, we (Luis and Mychal) will be telling you how our week went. We hope you enjoy our weekly update! It is about multiple of things, those multiple things are: On Monday we had music class, on Tuesday we had a super scary story, on Wednesday we had our Mad Scientist investigation finished and finally our Christalite Methodist Home trip. We hope you enjoy reading this week’s Weekly Update! Enjoy! Monday was pretty awesome. In Music, we practiced our Christmas songs for the Christalite Methodist Home. We are going to sing “Silent Night”, “Jingle Bells”, “Feliz Navidad” and “We Wish you a Merry Christmas”. Our favorite song has to be Feliz Navidad, because it’s short and can be extremely catchy.  We also sung Santa Claus is Coming to Town to Mr. Anderson to help his recording skills. We got to play a poison ball game which is where, there are three balls, two are poison, and the other is the cure for the poison. We pass the ball around while Mr. Anderson plays music. When the music stops who ever has the poison ball is out, whoever has the cure gets to save someone who had the poison ball. That’s all for Music on Monday. Tuesday was fantastic! We had a scary story from Mrs. Brundage! Although I hope everyone wasn't super scared. Secretly, I (Luis) was scared. It was actually pretty obvious that I was scared because I was hiding underneath my friends leg, covering my ears. The cool thing is that my class and Mr. DeMichele's class had a different scary story than everyone else. I loved this scary story because last year I left the classroom because it was so dark! Anyway... Boo! Did I scare you? I hoped you enjoyed how our scary story was like. On our wonderful Wednesday we had Mad Scientist. We also finished our third science investigation. Our third investigation was the Fizz Quiz. Mychal and I had so much fun on this investigation, because we didn’t just see chemical reactions. We learned about atoms, molecules and chemical equations. Mychal and I hope we did really well on our response sheet. That will sadly be all for Wednesday. I hope you all did well on the response sheet! On Thursday we went to the Christalite Methodist Home and made Santa hats for the elder people who live there. I felt like we not only learned a lot but we also got to meet some really nice people who were living there. One of the people even played “Amazing Grace” on his harmonica. We felt this field trip was good to help us that learn giving is just as good receiving. We can’t wait to go back in February! Mychal and I hope you enjoyed our Weekly Update. I hope you enjoyed our fantastic week about: Music, a scary story, Mad Scientist and our field trip. Tune in for the next weekly update. Next week's weekly updaters are: Meaghan and Alexa. Bye!

Sweet!

Science can be pretty sweet!  

Who'd have thought there would be so many chemical reactions happening when you busted out your apron and a few chocolate chips.

For more entertaining videos, head on over to The Kid Should See This!  Thanks to Alexa's mom for reminding me of the awesome website.

Christalite Methodist Home Service Learning

What an amazing experience we had today at the Christalite Methodist Home!  There was Christmas singing, Santa hat decorating and a whole lot of smiles.  We're learning that with service learning, we get out of the experience what we put in.  And these kids sure put a lot in today!  

Hour of Coding

I've NEVER seen our class as quiet and focused as when they were coding an Angry Bird game.  What an engaging activity Mrs. Lynch brought to our class today.  I imagine there are future computer programers in some of our kids.  It's an awesome sight to see!

If you're interested in doing even more coding,
check out the Scratch class in our next EASA session!

Rock Star of the Week, Beatrice!

Beatrice's Rock Star Wordle

From Imprisonment to President

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin,
or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate,
and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love,
for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Rest in peace Nelson Mandela.

In Case You Were Wondering....

This is what awesomeness looks like!
Congratulations to our very own Beatrice,
and to all the Basketball Shootout winners.

Nandita and Alyssa's Weekly Update

Hello, this is Nandita and Alyssa from Mrs. Clayton’s class. We’re here to tell you about our amazing week. We both had an especially great time during P.E, Science Lab, and Reader’s Workshop. To find out more about what we did during our fantastic week, keep reading!

In P.E., we had Fun day! Fun day is after your class is done with all of their classes in swimming. We got to do fun cool things like diving, splashing and other fun things like that. We did so many activities, diving, going on the yellow slide and rode on those mats on top of the water. We saw a lot of boys that were playing basketball. (Some boys threw the ball from the top of the slide before they rode down.) The most popular activity the boys played was water polo. We thought that swimming with the fins were very fun too! We just wish that we could play tag games in water on Fun day. Sadly that was our last Fun day.

In science, we continued learning about the digestive system. We watched a Bill Nye video to learn some more about our last science experiment. Did you know that the digestive system starts before you even put the food in your mouth? It’s true. When you look at, smell, or even think about food, your mouth starts making saliva. The saliva helps to break down the food while it’s in your mouth. The food is now called chyme. Now, the chyme is that the food goes down into your stomach, where hydrochloric acid breaks down the food even more. After that, the food goes through your small intestine, (which is actually the longer one), and into your large intestine. (The shorter one.) There, all the nutrients are absorbed from the food. When this is done, well, you will have to go to the bathroom.

This week, we also started our nonfiction unit in Reader’s Workshop. Everybody picked a subject they wanted to learn about, or that they knew they could write a lot about. Dogs were a very popular topic. Once we’ve done as much research as possible, we will all write two pages about our subject. This is a really exciting unit for us, because we can learn a lot of information on subjects or topics that we like, or that we did not know much about. Right now we are gathering information on a sticky note. Later, it will turn into a wonderful masterpiece of true facts. We cannot wait to see everyone's writing.

Thank you for taking your time to read this Weekly Update. We hope you enjoyed reading about our Fun Day, Science Lab, and Reader’s Workshop this week. If you liked this, you should read more of the Weekly Updates from Mrs. Clayton's class! Have a wonderful, wacky weekend!

Awesome Opportunity!

A Year in Review!

Every year, Google publishes its annual Zeitgeist, a video about what mattered most in the year.
Last year, Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches and captured the year’s 10 fastest-rising global queries and the spirit of 2012.  From that report, the Google folks created a short video highlighting the events of 2012, as seen through the lens of Google searches.
It’s a different way and a different perspective to view the past year.
What do you think will be on the Zeitgeist this year?  Post your comments below!

Check out the 2010 video and 2011 video!

True or Hoax?

I had this video sent to me and thought it was INCREDIBLE!!  Then I put my thinking cap on and wondered if it was in fact real.  I mean, it looks real and one would hope that something like that could happen.  What do you think??  Share your ideas and think about how could you figure out if it's real or fake??

Rock Star of the Week, Anushka

Anushka's Rock Star Wordle

Kid President Rules!

Corn dogs, awesomeness and I don't know.
You can't argue with that kind of logic from Kid President.

If you're still in need of a pep talk, here's more from Kid President.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!

Wow, do our kids know how to party!  Impressively hard working readers were rewarded with more ice cream than they kids knew what to do with.  That combined with many different toppings, we couldn’t get through it all (but we sure did try!).  The kids selected holiday music to listen to and the gauntlet was thrown to see if we could finish every last scoop.  We sure did enjoy celebrating our reading accomplishments this afternoon!  Well done readers!

Basketball Shootout Coming in December!

Attention all you basketball players!  The Basketball Shootout is coming soon. More info came out in your Friday Folder last week. 

- Thursday, Dec 5th @7:30 - 8:00

- Finalists advance to Finals on Friday morning.

Good luck shooters!

Harrison and Declan's Weekly Update...

Hi! This is Harrison and Declan, and we are the authors of this Weekly Update. There has been so many fun things we did this week. It will certainly be hard to decide what to write about! This week we worked on our persuasive paragraphs, experimented in science, and competed in a grammar competition. We hope you enjoy our Weekly Update.

In Writing, we worked on our persuasive essays. We all had to come up with at least three different leads for our narratives. We could choose between using facts, using statistics, asking a question, using one or two short declarative sentences, stating the thesis directly, or presenting a hypothesis. It was interesting all the topics everyone chose. A large amount of people chose to write facts or statistics for one of their leads. We had lots of persuasive stories on smoking, pollution, and saving animals. I thought that it was so much fun to learn about what people really feel strongly on what should be changed. When our class met up we noticed that no one wrote short declarative sentences for their lead! A lot of kids got to share some of their leads which was very helpful for me to get ideas. I know that Declan and I had a hard time picking out which lead to choose from. I’m sure that many other kids had this problem in class because we all had so many good leads to choose from. We hope that the class is just as excited as Declan and I to keep on writing our persuasive essays.  

In Science, we learned about the digestion system. Did you know that your digestive system actually starts in your mouth? For an experiment, we took three vials, a measuring cup, and a vial of Iodine. There needs to be four partners in order to do this experiment. Partner one (me) needs to take one cracker and grind it into powder, then take two milliliters of the powder and pour it into a vial marked A. Partner two (Harrison) needs to spit into the measuring cup until the spit reached the five milliliters mark, then pour two milliliters of the powder into that vial and stir. Partner three had to pour water into a vial marked C, then pour two milliliters of the powder into the vial marked C. Partner four had to chew a cracker for five minutes, then spit it out into a vial marked D. Then we put one drop of Iodine in each vial. The crackers are filled with starch. The starch can be broken into sugar crystals by particles in your spit. We wanted to find out if spit would break starch into sugar crystals even though it wasn’t in your mouth. We also wanted to find out if water would break starch into sugar crystals. The reason that we put a drop of Iodine in each vial is because Iodine turns black in the presence of starch. Therefore, if the starch hasn’t broken into sugar, the Iodine will turn black. When we put a drop in each vial, the vial with only crushed cracker turned black, which meant the Iodine had found starch. The vial with water and cracker turned black, the vial with spit and crushed cracker didn’t turn black, and the vial with chewed cracker didn’t. That’s all for science. In Grammar, we had a competition, the boys against the girls. The competition will last four weeks until our next competition starts again. This is how it works, the boys or girls pick out a paragraph off a sheet our teacher gave us. Each paragraph has tons of grammar mistakes. Every round it switches out if the boys are the leaders or the girls are the leaders. Your team picks a speaker and your speaker says all the corrections that the team had made. If the other team finds any corrections that you didn’t find they get a point. Then the team that didn’t pick the paragraph gets to pick and you do it all over again. Whichever team wins, that team gets a Subway party. I hope that everyone had just as much fun as Declan and I. I think that our class is looking forward to continuing doing this competition.   I hope you have enjoyed reading our Weekly Update as much as Declan and I have had writing it. As you have seen, it has been a very exciting week in Mrs.Clayton’s class, and we had a very enjoyable time writing it out. It was super hard to decide what to write about since it was such an interesting week. We will keep you updated in the following weeks. We hoped you learned something new in our Weekly Update. Thanks for listening.

IXL to the Rescue...

Here's a bit of review of concepts in Topic 5 and a preview of what's to come in Topic 6.  

Review Dividing 2-Digit Divisors: E.15 - E.19
Preview Multiplying Decimals: Any from Section G 

Thinking About Wonder...

While we read aloud today, we're going to share our thinking in a different way.  While we listen, we'll be 'talking' to each other on TodaysMeet. 
The focus of today's "Meet" is comparing characters with ourselves.  When we look at the struggles and dreams that our characters have, we think of ways in which we are similar to these characters.  There are particular characters that a reader begins to identify with and learn life-lessons from.  
As we read today, add your own thinking with your focus being on this idea.  Please make sure you comments are relevant and add to the conversation.
Group 1-11
Group 12-22

Don't Forget!

We head over to the Book Fair next Tuesday. Make sure you bring some mulah if you want to buys books. They'll have thousands to choose from!

Gratitude...

Lately, we've talked a lot about the importance of being thankful. Thankful for friends and family, grateful to have a roof over our head and healthy foods to eat, the list could really go on and on. This short video sums up a lot about how valuable it is to be grateful for what we have.  And at our school, we sure do have A LOT!  

 

Rock Star of the Week, Alexa!

Alexa's Rock Star Wordle

Beatrice and Anushka's Weekly Update...

Hi, this is Beatrice and Anushka here, reporting live from S.A.S. with our very own Mrs. Clayton’s class! No doubt this week was amazing and fun. We have been here for a week and we are here to report our favorite highlights. Everyone had great results for their math test and as you can imagine they were super excited to see that. Also, as usual, reading as hard as they can, hoping to complete the Ice Cream Genre Challenge to finally get the ice cream party started that they have been dreaming of for so long. And of course, everyone’s favorite, U.N. day!  Last but not least, all about our extraordinary assessments in swimming during P.E! So sit back and relax while we tell you about Mrs. Clayton’s class here at SAS. On Monday, the results of their topic 4 math test came out. With the witness of Mrs. Clayton, we know that we have scored exceptionally well. This is the evidence that we have the best teacher ever for teaching so well. Great job to all of the students for doing so well on the math test and for trying so hard as this topic was division. If you are anything like us, we sometimes had a tricky time solving the puzzles. After listening to a few other students, we agree that the test was easy, hard, and confusing in some points. If you didn’t check over your work well, there is a chance that you made a silly mistake, because checking your work is important. Estimating, exact answers, using money as models, there were so many ways that we did division. Everyone had seemed very proud of themselves when they saw their results. Some kids used that time to get help from Mrs.Clayton because they had trouble with some problems. We saw our test and let us tell you, it wasn’t as easy as it looks. We’d say that the trickiest part about the math test were the problems that included money. Most people would be thrilled to do math including money but really it is quite hard. They spent about ten minutes on EARs (Error Analysis Report), at least those who needed them (told you we scored well), and then, proceeded to doing either IXL or their enrichment booklet. Again, fantastic job on the test! Now we will tell you about what we have been doing this week in Reader’s Workshop. To begin with, we will tell you about the -drumroll please- Ice Cream Genre Challenge! The Ice Cream Genre Challenge, is a challenge (as most of you have guessed by now) where we have to read eight books each with different genres. The eight genres were; realistic fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, adventure, humor, classic, mystery, and last but not least a freebie. The freebie was any genre we felt like reading. The Ice Cream Genre Challenge will end on November 22, so that is the reason that most of us are reading as much as we can. We are wondering what was their favorite genre and did it change because they discovered a new genre? Also, are there any genres that they have discovered that they love? We know we have. There are only two more weeks, but so far about a quarter of the class is done and about half the class will be done by the end of the week! Fingers crossed that many more students will be done with their Ice Cream Genre Challenge by November 22 as hopefully they are going to be reading crazily this weekend hoping to get their cherries and certificate for finishing! A big congratulation to all the students who have already finished and those who are about to finish. Those of you who are still working on it, hang in there and keep reading! Also in reader’s workshop, Mrs.Clayton has been reading aloud from Wonder. This is an amazing book is by R.J. Palacio about an ordinary boy named Auggie a.k.a. August, who has a deformed face while we learn about his obstacles and how life isn’t always easy. We have developing reading skills, and trying to write good sticky-notes. (Some of us are still getting used to writing sticky notes and are so wrapped up into the book that guess what? We forget to write any.) It models what we should be doing with our Ice Cream Genre books, or any books that we are reading in class. The class has been writing extraordinary responses on their own so far and we hope that they keep improving on their sticky-notes throughout the year. Now, the autobiography of our very special United Nations Day! Each class created a presentation with another class to show the rest of fifth grade. We created a presentation about authors from around the world, and a big thank you to our techies Nate and Harrison for putting in all that time in to work our presentation!  The presentation was with Mr.DeMichele’s class and our eight authors from around the world were: Margaret Mahy from New Zealand, Cornelia Funke from Germany, Gary Paulsen from the U.S., Eoin Colfer from Ireland, Eva Ibbotson from Austria and Michael Morpurgo from England. Both classes did a great job doing their presentation and we wouldn't change a thing! Click here to watch the video! We learned so much about international literacy. There's a lot to be grateful for at our school.  Many different cultures and a library with too many books to choose from. Hopefully, we have convinced some of fifth grade to read books from our authors because that was our mission. All of the other classes did well on their projects for the UN day assembly too. One of them was about the true story behind nursery rhymes that children learned every single day. You would have never guessed that the tune “Rain, Rain Go Away” was actually about a thunderstorm in a war. Another presentation was about the percentage of education and amount of people that could read and write in many countries around the world. The numbers were sometimes high and sometimes harshly low, so organisations that help the countries’ education were also included so we could donate. The funniest one (in our opinion) was a remix version of a song called “I’m Reading and I Know It”. The kids were like mini versions of DJs up there! That assembly was most informative and was fun to watch. Everyone did well on their part! It was very exciting to see all of the unique clothing from different countries as almost  each student wore a piece of clothing that comes from the country that they originate from. There were tons of countries. U.S.A., Canada, India, Korea, Philippines, an  interesting and beautiful Hungarian outfit, we could go on and on. We did have swimming, but it seemed like no one cared that they had to change.  Another thing that made UN Day day fantastic, is that we got to try different foods from different countries. Some were things that we had never seen or heard of, while others were everyday foods that we had. Above all, everything tasted like a delicacy. Thank you to the moms and dads for cooking these phenomenal treats. On Tuesday we had an amazing swimming class with Ms. Wenstrom and Mrs. Bell. To begin with, we had several two swimming assessments. Diving and underwater swim. Most students did astonishingly, impressively well, considering how hard it can be to arch your back and have your chin tucked in perfectly to curl into the water (diving). As well as holding your breath while you are completely underwater and swimming for 12 meters! We’re going to tell you about the diving assessments first. We all had to dive off a diving block into the deep water pool. Most students did tremendous. They knew what to improve on their diving because we had an ipad that was filming us in delay so that we could see our diving.  Everyone at least had one thing to work on. We had to be super careful with the ipad because it could fall in the pool and also, it was drizzling. The hardest part of the assessments so far, we think for most students, is the 12 meter underwater swim! Do you know how far that is? Well, here’s the approximate answer; from one end of our classroom to the other and it seriously is NOT easy. A few tips (if you ever happen to have to do this) are: don’t look up in the underwater swim because that will make you want to breath, don’t let all your air out at once when you go under water for the underwater swim, instead slowly let it out. While we were waiting to do the assessments, we practiced our freestyle, freestyle kick, breaststroke, and our breaststroke kick. In other words we did freestyle kick to cool down from freestyle and breaststroke kick to cool down from breaststroke. We’re glad that the tests went pretty well! Unfortunately, this weekly update is over. These were not all of the details of our prodigious week of November 11-15 (we would write more but we don’t want to make it too long), but were good ones. We hope that everyone experienced  this week in a fun way. The phenomenal scores on the math test, the awesome progress on the genre challenge, our fun read aloud book and the incredible effort people made on the swimming test and the amazing UN Day. Those were all the best highlights of the week. We are grateful to have this opportunity to report this week in Mrs. Clayton’s class A.K.A the best class ever to exist. Enjoy the weekend!

UN Day Extravaganza!

Thank you to all the parents and kids that helped make UN Day such a success!  We learned so much about international literacy.  There's a lot to be grateful for at our school.  Many different cultures and a library with too many books to choose from.

What wonderful thinking i308 has done in researching their three authors from Germany, Ireland and England.  I hope you enjoy the movie we created with Mr. DeMichele's class!

CNN Student News...

If you haven't had a chance to check out CNN Student News yet, today's show has some coverage that hits close to home with news about Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines over the weekend.   Have a look.   

Snuggle Up and Read Day

What a day it was!  The perfect way to end the week and begin Fall Break.  We sure did enjoy snuggling up and reading!

Our First Rock Star Mall!

After working hard on our jobs for 7-8 weeks, we all realised how much the work paid off. We started counting all of our Starbucks (special/fake form of currency) because the more we had, the more we could spend. Why? This is Noemi and Anushka informing you about the famous (drumroll please) Rock Star Mall

Each of us got a job, assigned by Mrs. Clayton, that we got paid for. This is where lots of Starbucks came in. As we said before, nobody knew how handy they would come in. There were glamorous objects, that cost as much they looked.  Like a pass to go to Subway, a great sandwich shop, that cost 20 Starbucks. You would need to be pretty sure and rich to give up so much money. See what I mean? Jobs are important. 

Mrs. Clayton bought some candy, school supplies, made some homework passes and a few tickets to Subway. For about forty minutes we went around the classroom, with the Starbucks we earned, carefully eyeing each purchase, making sure it was worth it.  Like candy, though somewhat expensive, was worth it. Some things like fruit roll ups sold out really quickly. People that had jobs got to go first, which is fair after all their hard work. Things sold out real quick though.

While some people were shopping (about seven at a time) the rest of us watched Bill Nye the Science Guy. Everybody was so anxious to get the item they wanted, that almost the whole time they looked at the shop to make sure the item they really wanted was still available.  Some items got sold super quickly.

When someone was called they ran quickly to their desk to get their bag of Starbucks. When they found their bags they ran over to the Rock Star Mall and grabbed a basket and a check list. Then raced over to the item they had been eying the whole time.

Some people were unlucky because, they didn’t get what they wanted. But nobody was too upset, everyone knew that the Rock Star Mall will be open again next quarter (which was in a long time) so, there was no time to be upset. Everybody knows that times goes by super quickly when you're shopping so, there was no time to waste.

This entire experience was not only fun, but also gave us a chance to get responsibility. We needed to watch how we were spending our mula (money). If we spent too much, there wouldn’t be very much left and nobody could tell us to stop. We needed to make many decisions and control our wants. If we squandered, there may not be enough left for other things. If you are too careful, you may end up not getting anything at all. To actually enjoy shopping and buy things, you need to balance between worrywart and not too happy-go-lucky.  

I am out of words to describe the Rock Star Mall. This is leaving us longing for more. Someone must have a four leaf clover because we are super lucky to have a teacher that would allow us to have a mall and put marvelous objects in it. These are all the details about the Rock Star Mall. We hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did!

By: Noemi and Anushka

IXL to the Rescue!

Here's a bit of review of concepts in Topic 4 and a preview of what's to come in Topic 5.  

Review: E. 1-14, E.20, E.21
Preview: E.15 - E.19

Rock Star of the Week, Ryan

Rock Star of the Week, Ryan

Marathon Club Finishers!

Congratulations to all the Marathon Club finishers! i308 is particularly proud of our own runners:
Declan, Luis, Beatrice and Julia!

Time for the Festival of Lights!

Young Seo and Johan's Weekly Update...

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... there lived the peaceful citizens of the United Class of Mrs.Clayton! Where Johan and Young Seo’s Weekly Update began! We would like to talk about 3 amazing things that happened during the week. Puzzles, the Snuggle Up and Read day, and last but not least, everyone’s favorite... Halloween! Now, let’s begin the Weekly Update.

On Monday, we had an important lesson in Puzzles. We learned how to divide with quotients with the number 0 in them. It was slightly harder than the usual long division we did because we sometimes put the numbers in the wrong place. Mrs. C said this was the hardest lesson to learn, but we think that the money modeling lesson was the hardest of all.

On Friday, we read for the whole day. It was called Snuggle Up And Read. We still went to Art, World Language and Lunch. Pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, and comfy clothes were allowed, but some people didn’t wear nor bring anything, and others wore  their PJs and brought in big bags of blankets, and pillows. We got to rearrange the room however we wanted it to look like. If the arrangement was permanent, this would be the best class ever! We had a guest reader, Mr Filice, then we went on our computer to do some blog reading. Also independent reading was allowed. Reading for hours can get boring so we got to bring in candy. Young Seo and I had a lot of fun.

On Thursday, we had a Halloween party, everything was awesome. The only thing that made our day from a 10 to an 8, was we had swimming that day. So no makeup could be put on before school because it would get off in the pool. We had to put it on during lunch. All of fifth grade will be changing at lunch, so we weren’t the only class who went to school in a uniform. We all waited patiently to change into our Halloween costumes. Then came the best part of the day... The Halloween Party! We played very fun games like Charades, Murderer, and the guessing game. Then we ate the food the moms brought in and went home. We hope everyone had a awesome time trick-or-treating!

Now you know how wacky and amazing of a week we had! Young Seo and I enjoyed the week all because of Halloween, Snuggle Up and Read Day, and Puzzles. Stay tuned on Mrs. Clayton’s Rock Star Blog (Channel I308) for the next Weekly Update (November 11-15). We hope that you enjoyed the week and our Weekly Update. Enjoy your...(Drum Roll)...FALL BREAK!

Happy Halloween Kiddos!

I hope your Halloween experience is nothing like these kids!  Have fun trick-or-treating tonight.  Fingers crossed the thunderstorm passes quickly!

The Piano Guys

I've heard you've seen the Star Wars duel with the Cello Guy, here's another fun video from Me and My Cello.  Who know cello playing could be so much fun! Leave a comment about which part of the video was your favorite!

Volunteer Service Opportunity

Over the Thanksgiving break, a team of 25 SAS teachers will be going to Siem Reap as part of a Caring for Cambodia (CFC) Teacher Training project. This year our teachers will be sharing teaching methods in the subject of science with the Cambodian teachers. In the past we have shared information about hygiene and have distributed “hygiene kits”. These kits were a huge success and much needed in the community. We would sincerely like to continue this act of kindness.

How can you HELP? Our goal is to create and transport 1500 hygiene kits to Siem Reap. If you would like to participate please have your child bring in the following by Friday, November 15th.

1 bar of soap 1 small washcloth

1 comb 4 toothbrushes
1 large tube of toothpaste

Reading Partners

Check out the books we're reading with our reading partners! Books are much more enjoyable when we have someone to share them with.
 Happy Reading!

Rock Star of the Week, Noemi

Noemi's Rock Star Wordle

Encore, Encore!

What a treat to see this week's Rock Star, Johan, share his amazing talent on the violin. It made us all shout out,  "Encore, Encore!"  Check out the encore!

Kasym and Julia's Weekly Update...

Hi, this is Julia and Kasym and we are here with your Weekly Update! We had a wonderful, wacky, and weird week, so we wanted to tell you all about it! First, we had a interesting, confusing and entertaining day in math. Then, we had a cool, fantastic, and awesome day at the Science Centre. (That was our favorite part of the week!) Last but not least, we had a fun, interesting, and relaxing day in RLA. This week was loads of fun, so read to find out what we did during our amazing week! On Monday, we had math. We were learning how to estimate division problems, but we also learned what all the numbers in a division problem are actually called. The first number in a division problem is called the dividend. The second number is called the divisor and the answer is called the quotient. The trick that Mrs. Clayton (our teacher) gave us is: the way to remember the dividend is the first number and the first number is usually the bigger one and dividend is the longer word. That tells you that the second number is the quotient or the divisor. We have just memorized that, but the first trick has helped me (Kasym) at least. After we had done that, we learned how to estimate the quotients. First you have to see if the divisor can go into the five dividend using an easy multiplication fact. When you have found it, you work it out. Say it was 456/5 you would see that 456 can be rounded down to 450 which is easy to divide by five. goes into 45, 9 times so you write 9 then add on the extra 0 so you get 90. That is your answer. It is as I said a little harder than multiplication when you do hard ones like 454/6 or 765/3 but when you get the hang of it, it is quite easy. On Tuesday, we went to the Science Center and it was amazing. We learned heaps of new stuff like: did you know that rock-candy has a much higher boiling point than water? To make the lollipops you have to get seven tablespoons of sugar and put it in the sauce pan. You also have to get two tablespoons of water, then three tablespoons of corn syrup. You could add 1 drop of flavoring, and/or 1 drop of coloring to the saucepan. Most people did this, but it was optional.  You stir it up and then you put the saucepan on a warm plate with the temperature at medium. You leave it on medium until it boils, then you turn the temperature to low and leave it for ten minutes. You have to be stirring the whole time though. When it is finished, you have to pour it into moulds really quickly or it hardens in the pot. Some of our helpers had to pour it for us because we were too scared. Even when we had got it in the moulds, we had to wait fifteen to twenty minutes before we could eat it. We stuck toothpicks in it, but since you have to wait fifteen to twenty minutes, our arms got kind of tired. Then it was free time, so we could go anywhere we wanted to go! One of my favorite bits was this wheel that we played on. You were supposed to run on the wheel, but it was much more fun if you just tried to stand (which none of us could). It looked like a massive doggy pile when all of us fell over.  We also watched a really cool electrical show and OUR TEACHER was part of it. She got in this metal cage and the electricity got attracted to the metal so it was electrified! Thankfully our teacher didn’t get hurt, but she did hear loud noises even though she had ear-muffs on. On Wednesday we had RLA. The class did two things in one. First of all, we got new reading partners. Both partners are the same reading level, you’ll see why Hopefully everyone likes their reading partners too! Second, we (the two reading partners) got to pick out a book, and read that book for the week! I think everybody loves the book that they chose.  I (Julia) love the book that I chose at least! We got to see who our reading partners were first.  I thought it was fun peering down the list and looking up and down to see my name, then see who was my reading partner. We talked with our reading partners about what our favorite genre is, who our favorite author is, etc. Then we got to go to the fifth-grade group room and pick out our books! Mrs. Clayton told us that the genre had to be Realistic Fiction. For some people it took them a second to find the book they wanted, but for other people, they just couldn’t find the right book. There are soooo many books to choose from, that you don’t just want to pick one, but many! The fifth grade group room had every book a person would need! I would want to see someone read all of those books. I think that it would take them at least 5 years! It was also hard when we had to choose a book at our reading level, because some of us (I know for sure me) wanted to get a book from a level way harder than my reading level! Finally, when everything was settled, and everyone had a book, we got to read that book anywhere in the group room we wanted! Mrs. Clayton went around taking pictures, and I guarantee that she will put those pictures onto the class blog. I hope that everybody is into their books already! Both Kasym and I are already into our books! Now our superb week has come to an end! Waaaa! Our week, you can see, has been so splendid that we just had to write sooooooo much. We hope that all of you loved this week’s Weekly Update. We enjoyed math, reading, and especially going to the Science Centre, so that’s why we choose to write all about these things! Again this is the end of the Weekly Update, and I don’t want to make it that long, so we hope you had a fun time reading this and next week you will hear about what we did through Oct. 28-31! Once again we hope you enjoyed. Please comment and give us any ideas on what we could do better next time.

IXL to the Rescue!

Here's a bit of review of concepts in Topic 4 and a preview of what's to come in Topic 5 (after Fall Break).  Only a few more lessons and we'll have our Topic 4 test towards the end of next week.

Review: H.1 - H.9, H.13, H.14

Preview: H.10 - H.12

To, Two, and Too

The English language can sure be confusing!  Hopefully this video can help shed some light on the homophones to, two and too!

Getting Ready for Halloween

If you think these pumpkins are awesome, you'll have to check out the rest of these creatively carved gourds.  Trick or Treat!!!

Visiting Author, Harry Bliss

Just a reminder that Harry Bliss, our PTA sponsored Illustrator in Residence, is working with us in our art class THIS Thursday.  Yippee! Parents are invited to attend any of the sessions that are being offered. You may link to his schedule here. Don't forget that his books (which can be signed and inscribed) are available for purchase in the library. Here's the book order link.

Headed to the Science Center!

What an adventure today was!  I don't know if our favorite part was playing around in the Kinetic Garden or making cotton candy or boiling our solutions to make lollipops or just hanging out with friends.  Thanks to Mrs. Havens, Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Chua and Mr. Surrency for all their help with our kids.  Have a look at our pictures to see the fun we had on our trip to the Singapore Science Center!

Science Rocks!

Classic vs. Best Seller?

Who remembers the difference between a Classic and a Best Seller book?  Leave a comment below to help those that are still struggling with that idea.  

Rock Star of the Week, Johan!

Johan's Rock Star Wordle

Meeting Salva Dut!

We are SO very lucky to have the opportunity to meet Salva Dut this Friday!  If you were one of the many that snatched up Linda Sue Park's book, A Long Walk To Water, you'll be especially excited to see this man in person.  His journey is incredible, his compassion is inspiring and his work is something we can all aspire to achieve.  If you're interested in learning more about him, have a look at this website, Water for South Sudan.  Get ready to be inspired!

Playing Around With Rock Candy

Saturation, solutions, supersaturated solutions...is it all a bit confusing?  Check out this video on how to make rock candy which may help these concepts sink in! 

Amber and Vainavi's Weekly Update....

Hello, this is Amber and Vainavi. Today we will be telling you about our fantastic week! We will tell you what we did that made each day so special. Last but not least, why we enjoyed what we did so much. With the help of our wonderful teacher Mrs. Clayton, we did many fun and educational things like swimming, Mad Scientists and our unit three math test! On Monday, we had our first swimming lesson with Ms. Wenstrom and Ms. Bell. Hopefully, no one felt embarrassed doing the solo swim in a certain stroke. I bet that everyone hated it when we had to go to the cold, freezing shower before we went into the pool. We mainly liked it when we got to practice our strokes before we did the solo swim. So then we were all warmed up to start our assessment.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we had Mad Scientists! We tried to figure out how many grams it would take to saturate Epsom Salt. We had to shake like crazy to make the salt dissolve before we added more salt. We learned how many grams it would take for the salt to saturate. It was hard to saturate the salt, because we had to first finish shaking the bottle, until the salt dissolved. Then we added more salt until it was saturated. According to us it was like a dance party from shaking so much! It took so long to saturate the Epsom Salt compared to the Kosher Salt. So, that is why we had to finish our experiment on Thursday.

On Thursday, we had our unit three math test. Our math subject was about multiplying larger numbers. To us, the part that wasn’t so easy was multiplying three digit by three digit numbers. We hoped that we aced the test as well as everyone else. We were both stressed out at first, but it was easier than we thought.

Sadly, that was the end of our wonderful and busy week. We had so much fun in these 4 days, that we never even realized how fast it went! Hopefully everybody enjoyed their week as much as we did!

Mr. Brown's September Precept

WHEN GIVEN THE CHOICE BETWEEN
BEING RIGHT AND BEING KIND.
If you had your own precept, what would it be?

A Wall of Words...

Do you think we should create one of these in our classroom?  What do you think?  Let me know if you're interested in helping set this up.

Searching for a Good Book?

Are you dying to find a book that you can't peel yourself away from?  Have a peek at Book Adventure to discover a few fantastic reads!

Let's Get Ready to Divide!

Let's get ready to divide.  We're just dividing by 1-digit divisors in the next topic.  Have a look at these division games to help you with the next Topic in Puzzles.
Division Jeopardy
H.3 IXL (Division by 1 digit numbers)
H.6 IXL (Estimating quotients)
Snowball Fight (Division Facts)

Ryan and Nate's Weekly Update...

Hello, this is Nate and Ryan, and we’re from Mrs.Clayton’s class. The both of us will be doing this week’s Weekly Update. There were three subjects that we did that we wanted to  write about this week. Read about what happened during these subjects, in our sensational week.

First off, on Tuesday in writing, we all glued our final copies of our small seed stories into our covers. We all went around reading each others stories, and commented on them with sticky notes. Luckily, Mrs.Clayton was being really compassionate and generous enough to give each of us four pieces of candy. Did you see how much our writing has improved since our first draft?

Later that day, we had a special guest assembly with Courtney Campbell. Courtney is known around the globe for her hilarious show, “Mustard Pancakes”. She told us stories about a girl named Burp, and her funny childhood, and sang a song that we all had to dance too. If you want to see more, click here to go to her website. She was so much fun. We were very lucky to have her come.

Last but not least, on Thursday and Friday, we learned two different ways to ways to help solve two-digit by two-digit number math problems. We learned the partial products method and the traditional method. Both of us are still getting the hang of the traditional method, but we’re so glad that we could learn it.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our Weekly Update. It was so much fun putting this together for you. Now enjoy your week!