I can’t believe we’ve been in school for over a month now. The time is going by so fast and we’ve been really busy! I apologize for not keeping our blog updated. We need to catch you up on all the fantastic things we’ve been doing in our classroom.
MI Day 
We started out the year with MI Day. We spent a whole day learning about the different multiple intelligences and finding out which ones we are good at. The day was based around plants and animals and we had a blast traveling from station to station! We also took an online quiz in tech class and created a graph of our strengths and weaknesses with the multiple intelligences.
Lincoln Park Zoo 
The intermediate classes took a field trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Before our trip, we worked with our groups to create a map of what we wanted to see while we were there. That day we visited the animals we were interested in and took notes on each one. We will use this information when we write our animal research project later this year. We saw many fascinating animals, including the snow leopard, the lions, polar bear, and the penguins.
Camp Duncan 
The 5th grade students had an overnight outdoor educational field trip to Camp Duncan in early October. They spent Thursday and Friday learning doing team building activities, tye-dying t-shirts, and learning about the outdoor wilderness. They really enjoyed the camp fire and staying in cabins! The 4th graders worked with other 4th grade students in the building those two days. They practiced their geography skills by creating maps of “lost” islands. They also watched a fascinating movie about energy called “City of Ember”. It’s based on a really interesting chapter book you might enjoy!
Themes 
This year we started off the year studying economics. We learned about supply and demand, goods and services, producers and consumers. We will be applying what we’ve learned throughout the year as we do some fund-raising for our school. We are now studying light, color, and electricity. So far, we’ve learned about reflection, refraction, opaque, transparent, and translucent. We’ve done some amazing experiments in the science lab. We learned how fiber optics work and we created concave and convex lenses.
Goals
We also took our beginning of the year MAPs test for Reading, Math, and Language. We are using that information to write our goals for this year. We’ve been working hard on our power points for triad conferences which are coming up Nov. 11th and 12th. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve accomplished!
So far our year is off to a great start! We are going to make it a priority to update our blog as much as possible, so please be sure to check back each week! We hope to hear lots of positive comments from everyone and find new and interesting blogs to follow this year!
