November Has Come and Gone!

With the changing of seasons comes the changing of our classrooms too.  Some of our friends have relocated to other schools and a few of us have switched up homerooms, but the one thing that will not change is that learning is taking place in the 5th grade!

November was full of Science Discovery and our Thanksgiving Feast.  For years I have had students all bring in one assigned can of food, then we mix it all up into crock pots and have our very own Stone Soup (of course we don't use the stones, and because of dietary restrictions - I've switched to using vegetarian frozen sausage crumbles)... The biggest surprise to children is that I too can cook :-)

My biggest regret  about our Stone Soup Thanksgiving Feast is that no one took any photographs for me to post here (I was busy flipping grilled cheese sandwiches!)

We started off the month of December diving hard into matter, the phases of matter, the properties of matter, and the changes matter can go through.  These are just a couple of quick clips of experiements taking place in the classroom.

In the clip below, we measured the mass of vinegar, baking soda, balloon, and water bottle, separately.  We then mixed them together again (and aside from a little gas leaking out) measured all the matter still in place ... of course in a perfect world it would have been equal.  In actuality - we were off by a couple of grams.

In the clip below students are measuring the mass of pieces of Legos and then creating a figure. They measure the mass of the figure - illustrating that the sum of the parts = the sum of the whole.

As always - to learn more about Science, Math, or Reading skills - sign into http://gcsnc.discoveryeducation.com using your user names and passwords provided.