A WEEK OF FUN!

  Every elementary teacher will tell you that the week before the holiday break is tough. The kids are overly excited and academics is the last thing on their mind, and yet we still plug on hoping that we are keeping them focus. With that being said, I thought it be a great idea to find a happy medium to all this madness. All this week my students were able to explore all the wonderful learning materials that are in our classroom, and we have A TON! The morning started with a logic problem, followed by a computer lesson, but after that, they were free to explore, and explore they did!  Here are a few pictures capturing the fun.

 Happy Holidays to all of you, and may the new year bring you peace and happiness!

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                THIRD GRADE by Mariana

"In the last GT class before winter break we started the day by doing a reindeer logic problem. Then we went to the fifth grade computer lab to do the last finishing touches to our Scratch Holiday cards.Mrs. Haider, from central office came to give us her opinion on how well we did, we had to add her thoughts on our rubrics that Mrs.Horan gave us to grade ourselves.We had free play for the rest of the day! Mrs.Horan had lots of things we could use, she had an two amazing Osmos,two Google cardboards,three huge Snap Circuts (elecric,motor and light)three huge tubs of Legos(and a table only the people using them could sit on).  The entire  science table was open and the whole drawer full of other toys was open as  
well! Every body was disappointed when she said that we had to clean up,because it was time to go home. 

  

HOUR OF CODE!

(Daisy the Dinosaur, Lightbot, Robot Turtles, Hopscotch, Scratch, Tynker)

Origami Snowflakes, 

Parodies, Mind Maps, and  Musical Talent.

First graders started their day by playing  Robot Turtle, a game to help younger students understand the process of coding. Lightbot was then introduced on the iPad and within minutes, the students were engaged in the beginning states of programming. 

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2nd graders 

Eugene and Cody playing Lighbot. 

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3rd graders

"Last week in GT we started off by learning how to make origami snowflakes ,then we ran out of time so we had to go to the computer lab to finish our scratch holiday cards but most of us were just finishing up all of the details so it didn't take that long. Then we got back to the classroom we finished making our origami snowflakes which we made with tissue paper , when we finished that we read one chapter of the Phantom Tollbooth. In math we learned what the golden ratio is, the golden ratio is approximately 1.618. The way we get to that number is if we drew a line and divided it into 2 parts, Part A & Part B. We used the formula A+B over A and it will  approximately be 1.618 which is the golden ratio. 

When we finished that we got our things and left to go home" By Mariana

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4th graders
Today was a terrific day! First, we studies a little parody. We watched Adele's latest song which was Hello. Then we watched the parody of it by Ellen DeGeneres and it was funny!!! Best video ever! A couple minutes later, we made a parody of the famous painting, Mona Lisa. That was fun!! I did a Eagle Woman which was based on the exquisite Philadelphia 
Eagles!! After that, we made snowflakes by the app Hopscotch. We had to code a character to make a unique snowflake from scratch.We then emailed it to Mrs.Horan who printed some of them out in color.  It was really fun!  After that, we grabbed our lunches and ate while reading Chasing Vermeer. Then, we did our paper snowflakes. Cindy's was very beautiful. That was amazing! The last thing we did was create a wonderful mind map. We had to use the 7 principals of Da Vinci, but it had to be about us. That was very cool!!! Finally with sadness, we left 
Mrs. Horan's classroom with delight. By:Alexander

Creating mind maps of the 7 principals of Da Vinci. This time, the theme was about us. 

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5th graders

This week in G.T we started off our great day by answering the question: Which is worse?-spending the holidays alone in a mansion or -homeless on the crowded streets of New York? We had a lot of conversation about this and some very philosophical answers.Then we downloaded an app called Tynker,while it was loading we read more of The Giver and found out a lot of interesting things. After that, we did an hour of code on Tynker. Later, we made origami snowflakes and they looked beautiful.At lunch we played 20 questions and discovered that Mrs.Horan was letting us play educational games the whole day next week, as her Christmas gift to us.  At the end of the day, we got to show our musical talent to Mrs.Horan and our class. Unfortunately,our fantastic day came to an end,but we always can look forward to next week!

By: Gloria