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.