We watched a stop motion video that another student created a few weeks ago. Jett from our class decided to investigate how to make them on his own. He experimented with Legos and his own camera at home. Here is some advice from Jett for those who would like to create their own stop motion animation:
1. Make sure to move your hand out of the way after you move the figure.
2. Be careful when you are using a flash. If there’s too much light it might make a reflection that messes up your movie.
3.Shadows can obscure the picture. Make sure to keep shadows away from the area where you’re shooting.
4. Be patient! It took 964 still pictures to make up the 2 minute video that you see below.
Check out the video Jett made. Our class thought it was AWESOME!
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We just finished with our big state test and have almost finished reading our latest book club books. In our class we have book clubs, groups of kids who choose a book to read together and who meet every week to discuss it. At the end of the book we create a presentation to share our book with others.
This time we’ve included our families in our book clubs! Parents and other family members have been reading our books along with us. We appreciate the support from everyone who is reading!
Our projects this time will be book trailers. We’ve seen lots of them online and were inspired to create our own. Look for an updated post next week with our finished book trailers.
Here’s a collage of the books we are reading, created with the Shape Collage iOS app. Have you read any of these books?
Our class has been learning about Bernoulli’s Principle and the science of flight. We came across the Kites Around the World wiki and we decided to do some research about kite flying. We thought it was interesting to read on the wiki about all the people from cultures around the world who make and fly kites.
In our class discussion about kite flying in our area, we realized that we don’t see people flying kites here in the desert very often. We think this is because of our climate. Our research showed that kites fly best in breezy conditions, when the wind speed is between 10-20 miles per hour. During the mild winter months in the desert area where we live, breezy days are rare. The average wind speeds in our area are much greater in the summer. In fact, during our summer monsoon season we often have violent, windy dust storms (called “haboobs”). However, our summer temperatures are typically around 110° F; most people wouldn’t want to run around flying a kite in heat like that!
Even though our weather isn’t ideal for kite flying, we decided to try it anyway. We found a website for a kite shop in Hawaii called Big Wind Kite Factory, which had a great tutorial showing how to make individual kites out of one piece of paper. We decided to try making kites using their plan. The site said their plan could make 20 kites f0r 20 kids in 20 minutes. We found we could each make a kite in less than two minutes! Here’s a video of how we did it.
Once our kites were completed, we had to wait for a windy day! We watched the daily windspeed forecast here.
Finally, on April 2, we had a day with wind speeds from 5-10 miles per hour, and we decided to test our kites. We had a great time learning how to get our kites in the air, and some of them actually stayed up for a little while! One student even brought a dragon kite from home to test. Here is an Animoto video of our kite-flying adventure.
(By the way, this time we used the new Animoto app to create a video instead of the Animoto website. We love how quick and easy it was; the video was complete before we even went inside!)
It was fun to learn about kites and how they are made. We have started talking about how we can refine our designs to make them fly better.
Have you ever flown a kite?
Usually we use a lot of technology in our classroom, but today we went old school! This morning we all played board games. Games are fun to play, but they also teach us useful skills in problem-solving, creativity and collaboration. These are the games we played this morning:
Story Cubes and Story Cubes Actions
Here are some students’ comments about the games:
- I like Forbidden Island because you have to figure out how to move to get off the island with the treasures. You have to work together to figure it out. You have to use your imagination to play a role on the team and pretend like you’re actually going to all those places.
- Story Cubes is fun because you can be creative and make up a story however you want. You can play it by yourself or with a partner or a group. You can make up your own rules. We recorded our stories on the iPad to see who could make up the longest one.
- In Apples to Apples you have to think hard out which card match the category. It makes you creative in your thinking.
- In Sequence you have a team and you have to match the capital with the state. It’s hard because you and your partner have to collaborate without talking.
- With Scrambled States you have to know a lot about the states. You have to be a problem solver to figure out which card will work with the clue.
Here’s a quick Animoto showing us playing the games.
What was your favorite game?
Why was it your favorite?
UPDATE: Our musher, Ramey Smyth, came in third place! The first place musher was Dallas Seavey. He is the youngest winner in the history of the race! Congratulations to all the participants. We had a great time following you this year.
Attribution: Gates, Michelle. swingley02.jpg. 8-Mar-98. Pics4Learning. 4 Mar 2012 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>
The 2012 Iditarod Sled Dog Race started on Sunday. This is the 40th annual running of the race. The race starts in Anchorage and ends in Nome, a distance of about 1,049 miles. It’s a real endurance test for both the musher and his or her team of dogs.
Anchorage is over 2,500 miles away from our school in Arizona, but our fifth grade classes still follow to learn about the Iditarod race every year. We’ve read a series of stories in our reading book about the Iditarod and its history, and we enjoy researching and learning more about the exciting world of sled dog racing. We always like reading about places that are cold, especially as it starts to get really hot here!
This year we are participating in the eIditarod, a project where we track the progress of a musher and leave virtual messages for him at various race checkpoints. “Our” musher is Ramey Smyth. We researched all the musher profiles on the Iditarod site and then voted on the one we wanted to follow. We liked Ramey because his profile says he is “running under the banner of abstinence from drinking, smoking, and drugs”, and that goes along with the things we learned in DARE. We look forward to following his progress along the trail. Good luck, Ramey!
Students traced a map of the race trail onto butcher paper.
This is the finished trail map.
This is our eIditarod bulletin board, where we will be tracking Ramey's progress along the trail.
Do you know anything about the Iditarod?
