Mystery Forces

Which one of these suspects is responsible for causing the ball to roll down the ramp?

What do you know about the circulatory and respiratory systems?

A group of five third graders created a list of questions to test their classmates' understanding of the circulatory and respiratory systems.  Here are some responses to three of the questions:

Tell me in your own words what white blood cells do.

 Kiran:  The white blood cells fight infections and if you didn’t have them then when you get an infection and there would be nothing to fight against infections.

If you could choose to be a blood cell, which would you be?

 Sam:  I would be the white blood cell because I want to protect people’s bodies from getting infections and getting sick. 

What part of the blood are you most like?

 Anna:  I think I am most like a platelet because I am sort of clingy and I like to be important.  Important, like very helpful but not well known. 

Wampanoag Solstice Festival

Ideally we would have had a harvest festival when we harvested the corn last fall, but we hadn't learned about the Wampanoag yet.  So, we had a solstice festival instead.  We cooked corn that we had harvested and dried.  We made sobaheg, a meat stew with squash and corn meal.  We tried grinding corn and weaving.

Comic Strips

We made comic strips to show what the Wampanoags may have been thinking when they met the Pilgrims.  We used different apps to take photos, draw, and did image searches online and combined the results using our Comic Book app.

Class Poem: I Wish

I wish I could see my future.

I wish the school was made of blue, red, and orange gummy bears.

I wish I could swim in a sea of turquoise blue.

I wish I had the power of fire.

I wish I could climb a mountain that was 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet high.

I wish that the whole class was made out of chocolate cake.

I wish I could breath underwater.

I wish I was an eagle swooping down with the wind to get my prey.

I wish I could climb the Great Wall of China.

I wish I had a white silk dress that swirled like a snowstorm in St. Petersburg.

I wish that I was a wolf with gold eyes and grey and white fur.

I wish I could turn into a silvery fish and swim below the waves.

I wish I had one hundred books at my house.

I wish to be in Seattle among the blue and lime green. 

I wish that I was back in Pennsylvania where my heart is.

Thanks to Diana (poet and mother) for leading us in this writing activity!

How did the change in season affect the lives of the Wampanoag?

To find out, we took some notes from a really awesome website. 

We had to read and then determine the main idea of each paragraph.  Then we had to summarize what we learned.

Publishing Poems

We have been working on publishing poems.   This involves writing, rewriting and changing things, editing, typing, and selecting visuals to go with the poem.  Many of these poems are on display in the hall outside our classroom.  I will try to post more of these poems soon.  This poem was written by me but rewritten with the help of the class.