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.