Blog Archives

Welcome to the first blog post of the 2017-18 school year for Mrs. Hamman’s fifth grade class in Arizona! We wanted to introduce our class for the Student Blogging Challenge. We are getting close to the end of our first quarter, and will be going on Fall Break next week. We’ve had an eventful first nine weeks!

We have studied the geography of the regions of the United States, and memorized where each state is on a map. We each wrote a mini-research report about one of the fifty states.

We have been reading a lot of fun fictional books and stories. Our first class novel was Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul.  We also each chose a fiction book to read in our book clubs, and we made Flipgrid videos about them.

In writing, we’ve been working on expanding our sentences to make them more interesting. We’ve also been working on responding to text using the RACE strategy. We’ll be posting our emoji stories soon; check our class Instagram and Twitter accounts!

In math, we’ve been working on operations with whole numbers and decimals. We just started fractions this week, and we’ll be working on operations with fractions most of second quarter. Watch out for the brownie lesson…

Our first science unit was on the human body, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it! We’ve made models of cells and of the circulatory, skeletal, respiratory and muscular system, and this week we are working on the nervous system. It’s super interesting to see how all these body systems work together!

Here is a short video showing a few of the things we’ve done in our class.

First Quarter Memories 2017 from S Hamman on Vimeo.

What was your favorite memory of first quarter?
What are you looking forward to learning about in fifth grade?

This year we have shifted our focus with blogging to microblogging sites, so we haven’t written as many posts as in past years. You can check out what we’ve done on a daily basis on our Instagram and Twitter feeds. But at the end of the year, we’ve been reflecting on all we’ve learned, and the class blog is still the best place to do that.

We’ve had a great year and have had lots of fun experiences. We’ve connected with people from all over and have absorbed tons of new ideas! We are much stronger reader, writers, scientists, coders, citizens and mathematicians than we were at the beginning of the year, and we can’t wait to continue our learning in sixth grade!

As always, we take way more pictures than we could ever post! Our end of the year movie is broken into Part 1 and Part 2 below.

What are some of your favorite memories of this school year?

March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and our school joined others in celebrating it as Read Across America Day. We read in class every day, but today we got comfortable and had an extra long read-a-thon. Then we had a Google Hangout and read a Dr. Seuss book aloud to students at Accel. Here are some pictures of our day!

For the past few weeks our class has been learning about natural disasters and their effect on the environment. After we read about some disasters like hurricanes and forest fires as a class, we each chose another type of disaster to research. We wrote five-paragraph essays about what we learned.

After we finished our essays, we made a video to show what these dramatic natural disasters look like. We used the FxGuru iPhone app to create the special effects.

Here are some of the interesting facts we learned about the natural disasters we studied:

• Most people know about how Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79 A.D. and covered Pompeii, but it has also erupted at least 50 more times.
• The Tri-State Tornado on March 18, 1925, was the most destructive in history. It went through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and its path was over 200 miles long. It killed 695 people and injured over 2,000.
• The longest lightning bolt was almost 200 miles long. It happened during a thunderstorm in Oklahoma on June 20, 2007.
• Avalanches are a danger on mountains after 12 or more inches of snow have fallen. If an avalanche is triggered, the snow can pour down the mountain at a rate of over 80 miles per hour.
• Floods can be deadly, but they also can help the environment. The sediment in flood waters may cause the soil to be more fertile.

October in our classroom from S Hamman on Vimeo.

This video shows the highlights of our past month. Here are our descriptions of some of the activities you can see in the video.

• The Oreo Challenge is done by students all over the world. You get into groups and stack regular Oreos as high as they can go. The winners from each group stacked against each other. Christilyn was the champion of our class. We kept records of our stacks and reported our data to the Projects by Jen website. You can see the final results here. We’ll be using our data to write real-world math problems with fractions next week.
• Breakout is an exciting and challenging game! The object of the game is to unlock a group of locks before the time runs out. The teacher gives you one clue, then the other information you search for helps you to unlock all the others. It really makes you think! Last month we played one Breakout with a Minecraft theme, and one based on our current read aloud, Pax.
• In math we used tiles, cubes, fraction strips and big whiteboards to practicing adding and subtracting with fractions.
• Walking Classroom is an activity that is fun but also makes you learn. We each have a podcast player loaded with educational podcasts. It also gives you some exercise on the days when you don’t have P.E. Walking Classroom is a great tool for learning. We learned that we can concentrate on lessons better when we are moving around.
• In the makerspace, we played Breakout, made a model of a biomechanical hand, built circuits with Makey Makey, and participated in the Marshmallow Challenge.
• Doing the Marshmallow Challenge helps you learn to work together as a team. The original idea for the challenge came from this website. The teams whose towers stayed up concentrated on building a strong base instead of a taller tower. On the day we did the challenge, we did a Google Hangout with a group of teachers in California who also were doing the challenge to talk about what we learned.
• We have also connected with other people outside our classroom this month. We did a Mystery Skype with a class of fifth graders in San Diego. We spoke with an archaeologist and a Zuni tribal elder who were working on some Mogollon ruins in New Mexico; we learned how these people lived hundreds of years ago, and how they recorded their stories. A few days ago we spoke to Dan Hampton, a former Chicago Bears player who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He talked to us about how playing sports and persevering through hard times helped build his character.

Look for our next post some time in the next few weeks. Some of our classmates have set goals to earn their own personal blogs, so we’ll probably have some new student bloggers by then!

This post was written collaboratively by Mrs. Hamman’s students, using Google Classroom.