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!