Weekly Blog Post #17

March 28, 2014

Written by Matt, Mark, Kaiyla and Ed

Announcements

Today we watched a video on Muscular Dystrophy, because one of our classmates has this disease.  On Friday, April 4th YES is collecting donations for Muscular Dystrophy so we can support our friend. The money raised for the Muscular Dystrophy Association goes to helping to find a cure and to pay for kids to go to a summer camp in Maine.

We are bringing a scholastic book order home today.  They are due on Monday, because we received a coupon for Valentine's Day and it expires on Monday.  So, in order to use that coupon to receive a free book, we need to get our orders in quickly.  This can be done on line (at Scholastic.com and enter our class code of JFTXY) or by using the form coming home today.

Field Trip

On Tuesday, we went to the Portland Museum of Art with Ms. MacBride's class!  We saw lots of painted collages.  We also saw some paintings by Winslow Homer.  His studio is in Scarborough and they have set up a camera at his house pointing out to the ocean, which was a scene he painted over and over again.  There's a tv screen in the museum that shows the live shot of that scene for everyone to see.  

Math

We worked with transparent mirrors this week to sketch the reflection of a drawing.   The 3 transformations are called reflection, rotation and translation.

Social Studies/Writing

We finished the shipbuilding unit and have moved onto our Maine research projects.  Our bloggers are researching the Maine Red Claws (basketball team), tourmaline, graffiti and wolves.  We are using computers and books to research our topics, then we record our research in our Google Docs.

Read-a-loud

We are 2/3'rds of the way through The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  The first mate mysteriously died from a stab wound.  All the sailors thought Charlotte did it, because it was her knife. Charlotte is currently in the brig (which is the ship's jail) for the murder.   We can't wait to find out what happens next!

Reading

The class has broken into 4 reading groups.  We read out loud to each other, then discuss what's happening in the book.  The bloggers are reading A Boy at War by Harry Mazer.

Thanks for visiting our blog!  Have a nice weekend!

Weekly Blog Post #16

March 21, 2014

Written by:  Piper, Jasper, Kaiyla

Announcements

On Tuesday, March 25th we are going to the Portland Museum of Art.  We leave at 9:30 and will be back for lunch.  If you haven't returned your permission slip, please do so on Monday.

Classroom Economy

This week we had to pay taxes!!  We had to figure out which tax bracket we were in, depending on our income.  If we made under $14,000, we had to pay 5%.  If we made between $14,001 and $16,000, we had to pay 10%.  If we made over $16,001, we had to pay 20%.    If we donated money to a charity, we were able to deduct it from our taxes.  Our bloggers had to pay $4,382, $500 and $1,432 to Mayor Parkin.  That's a lot of cha-ching!  We had an interesting discussion about whether we thought it was fair for people who made more money to pay more taxes.  Some of us thought it was fair, while others thought it wasn't fair.  Below is the Parkinville Revenue Service Tax Form 1040 EZ.  This is how we calculated our taxes.

 

 

Field Trip

On Tuesday, we went to the Yarmouth History Center on East Elm St.  Amy Aldredge, the Program Director, gave us a great lesson on ship building in Yarmouth in the 1800's.  Did you know that Yarmouth never built Clipper ships?  It's true!  Yarmouth only built cargo vessels, such as sloops, schooners, barkentines and brigantines.  These cargo vessels transported materials, such as lumber and granite to far away places.  Clipper ships were passenger ships and were very fast (which is why it makes for a great mascot!).

The peak of ship building in Yarmouth was between 1850 - 1875.  William Rowe called this period the Golden Years.  Amy showed us pictures of the Yarmouth boat yard and through these pictures we were able to see the different stages of boat building.  The History Center has many artifacts in their collection, such as a caulking box.  Caulking is what the builders did to fill the gaps between the planks to make the boat airtight.  Amy also showed us an octant.  She explained that an octant is an instrument that sailors used to help them navigate through the waters.  They used the sun, moon and stars to figure out their location and their path to their destination.  She also showed us a logbook from the Lucy Ann, which was a schooner built in Yarmouth.  The first mate recorded all sorts of information in the logbook, such as knots, winds, longitude and latitude.  This log was given to the History Center by Frank Knight's family (the caretaker of Herbie!).

We made lots of connections between our read-a-loud book (Charlotte Doyle) and our field trip to the Yarmouth History Center.

We want to thank Amy for her time on Tuesday!  Our knowledge of shipbuilding in Yarmouth is growing!  Take a look at our pictures below.

Lucy Ann's logbook

Writing 

We worked on our shipbuilding research project.   We organized our notes into the following categories:  Shipbuilding in Yarmouth, Getting Trees, Tools Used and How to use a Wooden Vessel.  

We were able to use the information we learned during our field trip to help us with our research project.  These are some pictures of our research books.

Math

In math we worked on percentages.  We learned how to figure percentages out on the calculator.    The smaller number divided by the bigger number gives you an answer.  If you hit the "=" sign, it gives you the decimal.  If you hit the "%" sign, you get the percent.   Today we took the Unit 9 assessment.

 

Read-a-loud

We are still reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  This week we learned that a couple of characters died on the ship, which has added a lot of excitement to the story.  Charlotte has transformed herself in part 2.  She is more of a tom boy now, instead of a girly girl.   To prove to the sailors that she was one of them she climbed the mast.   

Yarmouth's Got Talent

Some of the acts from Yarmouth's Got Talent performed at YES on Monday.   The winners from K-4, 5-8 and 9-12 were present at the performance.  Our very own Lexi was part of the group that won the K-4 division.  Congrats Lexi!!  Jasper's brother was part of a winning group in the 5-8 division.  It was so fun to see all the contestants.  

 

Thanks for reading our blog!  Come back and visit next week.

Weekly Blog Post #15

March 7, 2014

Written by Jake & Hannah

Announcement

Have you heard the big news about Harrison Middle School?  Mr. Cuthbert, Mr. Arsenault, Mrs. Kellogg and a group of 7th grade students at HMS have been studying the impact of the European Green Crab on the coast of Maine.  Harrison Middle School was one of 2,300 schools to submit an idea to the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Contest.  HMS was chosen as one of 15 finalists!  As a result, HMS has won $35,000 in technology equipment!!   If they are chosen as the top 3, HMS has the ability to increase that to $135,000 in Samsung technology.  We need your help!  Please vote for HMS!!   

See WCSH 6's coverage of this project.
Please vote for their project. You can vote once per day until March 14, 2014. Click on the link below to see their video entry and vote.
VOTE  

Field Trip

On Tuesday, we went to Homestead Flooring to learn more about area using floor tiles.  We broke into groups and worked together to answer several questions.  Here are a couple of examples of questions we had to answer:  

1.  Find a 12" X 12" tile on the floor.  This is 1 square foot.  How many small tiles can fit in the 12" tile.  
2.  Mr. & Mrs. Parkin's upstairs bathroom is 5' X 3'.  How many square foot tiles will they need?  Mrs. Parkin likes the 6" square tiles better.  How many 6" square tiles will they need for the bathroom?

Here are some pictures from our field trip...

Class research project
We started a research project on ship building and its connection to Yarmouth.  Mrs. Parkin asked us lots of questions to get us thinking about how ships were made in the 1800's (see below).  

Website Newsela
We learned about a website called Newsela this week.  It gives lots of information on non-fiction topics.  This website gives information on the following topics : War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts.  Once you finish researching a topic, you can take a quiz to see how much you learned!  Ask your student what they learned on Newsela.

Math 
We took the Unit 8 Asssesment this week.  Now, we are working on Unit 9 which is on percentages.


Read aloud
Mrs. Parkin is reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  We are just starting the book, but it's about a girl who takes a ship from England to the United States.  

Thank you for reading our blog!  See you next week!