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!