March 1 - 5

We had a little bit of the insane sanity again this week, but not near as busy as last week. The only day that truly felt like a circus was Thursday because we spent the day working on our D.A.R.E. box, so sending people out on that amidst trying to do our everyday learning made it a bit three-ringed. The box turned out fantastic though! We started planning on Tuesday. The kids all designed an idea, and then we voted through them as a class to come up with a gigantic donut. Mmm...mmm.... It looks great! And what better than to bribe our DARE officer with than a huuuge "power ring" as he would call it. I decided to take advantage of the nice weather we've had this week. For one of our science lessons, we went outside to the field and created a human solar system. The planets were approximately in scale with each other, and their distances apart were the same. As hard as millions of miles are to conceive, I think this lesson might have put it a little more to scale. Coming up this week, we have one our parents coming in to build rockets with the kids. Weather permitting, we will build the rockets on Monday, paint them on Tuesday or Wednesday, and then take them to field on Thursday to launch them.

Our story this week is Anne of Green Gables. It's the story of a family who wanted to adopt a young boy, and mistakenly were sent a girl instead, and the struggles that came with them trying to grow as a family.

The students are going to be just heartbroken to find out that out math lessons are cut short this week to make some extra tim for the rocket building. We will still however be continuing into our lessons on fractions, including solving equations with fractions. We will then end the week with multiplying and dividing both positive and negative integers.

The BIG excitement for this week, however, is the Science Fair. 5th Grade judging is Tuesday, 6th grade judging is Wednesday, and 7th and 8th grade judging is Thursday. This means that our completed projects have to be here on Tuesday. They've been working on them a better part of the term so far, so I'm excited to see how well they're going to turn out. Being my first science fair, I'm sure these kids are just going to blow my expectations out of the water. They're a great bunch!

"People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them." from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery