Blog Archives

It’s been a couple of months since we’ve posted here, and we’ve been busy learning! We recently finished our units on colonial America and the American Revolution in social studies. In science we’ve been learning about the solar system, and in math we’ve been working on measurement and data. We’ve read lots of interesting articles and books and have been focusing on opinion writing in ELA. It’s almost time for the spring Student Blogging Challenge, and we are getting ready to post and comment weekly!

Here is a short video showing some of our projects from third quarter.

What do you want to tell the kids in the Student Blogging Challenge about our class? 

Mad Science Day is a tradition at our school. Every year on October 31, the fifth grade spends the whole day learning about science and doing science activities. You can see some of our past blog posts about Mad Science Day here: 2012, 2014, and 2015.

Here is a short video of some of the things we did this year. Do you have any questions about any of the things we did?

What was your favorite thing we did on Mad Science Day?

If we do another Mad Science Day, what science topics would you like to explore?

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!