Ready, set, GO!
8/31/2019
It’s great to be a teacher in the fall. A new school year brings a fresh start with fresh faces and all the promise that new beginnings are famous for. New supplies, a spruced up classroom, great ideas gathered from a summer of reflection… all these things make this one of the best parts of being a teacher. But the best part of the new school year is engaging with a new class of learners, eager to see what the year will bring. These past few days in our new fifth grade classroom have been busy. As new routines got established, students explored their new environment and got reacquainted after a summer away. They read, wrote, drew, talked, planned, organized, and played with numbers (can YOU think of an expression for every number 1-20 that only includes the number 4 and your choice of operations?! These fifth graders did!) Students also sorted the classroom library of novels by genre, discovering some titles to put on their “to be read” list. As we do at PNA every year, we spent significant time talking about the kind of classroom we want to build together - a classroom that will help each of us achieve our goals. These young learners have big hopes and dreams: to get good grades, to make new friends, to be neater and more organized, to read and write better, to master long division, to learn about flora and fauna, to learn fractions. They know where they want to head, and they began the journey with enthusiasm! Some of the activities we worked on this week were designed to teach me about each child as a learner, and to teach the children about their own learning processes. First we worked on building “All About Me Dodecahedrons" - 12 sided prisms - a task that took careful attention and significant effort. They turned out beautifully and students were justifiably proud of their hard work! As they worked, they learned about our classroom expectations for work quality and work ethic. They learned that many projects and activities in fifth grade will take more than one session to complete and the work will be a little tough at times. We also saved Fred this week. Fred was a (gummy) worm who was stranded on his capsized boat (cup) without access to his (gummy) lifesaver. This team building exercise challenged students to use trial and error and problem-solving skills to save Fred. It was not an easy task. Several times I heard, “This is so HARD!” Yet the teams resisted. They planned, regrouped, and begged for extra time - they were unwilling to give up. In the end, Fred was saved! You can learn about the "Saving Fred" task by watching the slide show the students did, here. Learning this year will be like this. It can and will be hard. It takes effort, persistence, and sustained effort. It takes teamwork, communication, and trial and error. These fifth graders proved this week that they are ready to go! 6 Months of Mold
5/18/2018
It's the end the of the year, and we frantically wrapping up loose ends and projects from the year. The three main projects that we are working on are our Choose Your Own Adventure Story, our novel writing project, and our mold experiments. Choose Your Own AdventureStudents are finishing up their CYOAS projects. They created nonlinear stories that begin during the American Revolution, which is our social studies topic. The stories can take many different directions and illustrate how individual choices can dramatically change our personal and collective histories. Projects will be published to a website I created. I will share the link with everyone when they are complete. Novel ProjectStudents wrote the majority of their novels in November and early December. During second semester, students worked on editing their projects, and now in May students are publishing their novels through Amazon's publishing company Createspace. This year's novels ranges from around 50 pages to nearly 200. They have done a great job. I'll send along links to their novels when we finalize them next week. Mold ExperimentsIn early December, we were finishing up a unit on ecosystems, which included decomposition. Our project for that unit involved allowing oranges and pizza to mold for 6 months with a different variable on each plate. We also had a control plate, meaning there was no added variable. Watch the video below to learn more. Photography Elective
5/11/2018
Electives are an important way for students to explore interests outside of the traditional curriculum. One of the electives that I just finished up with the students was photography. This elective was open to students in 1st through 5th grade. Each class had a different skill focus and a different element of photography. Classes focused on the importance of color, texture and pattern, and landscape. After learning about the topic and analyzing some example images, students first explore the element in the classroom. After some practice, students share their images with other students. Finally, once the class seems to have the hang of it, the class goes outside to search for pictures that are good examples of the photographic element for the day. Students were very creative in what they used for subject matter. They were encouraged to zoom in and find the beauty in simple things, and they did very well at it. Below, you can see some pics of students exploring the outdoors with their cameras. Students take landscape photos. A student takes a texture photo of the grass. Students search for texture and pattern photos.
Coded Messages
4/28/2018
Students have been busy creating their choose your own adventure stories for the past week. These stories integrate real historical events from the time of the American Revolution. Each students chose to write from the perspective of someone from that time period. They could choose to write from the perspective of a patriot colonist, a loyalist colonist, a slave, or a Native American. Students present the reader with choices along the way that the character can make. The reader makes the choice and the story continues based on the choice.
The stories are being created in a software called Twine from twinery.org. This program allows students to create nonlinear stories. Each scenario links to other scenarios in a form that looks something like a family tree. When the story is done, it can be exported into html and can be played like a game. The choices that the reader makes is highlighted as a link, and when a link is clicked, the screen changes to the next scene. Students are learning basic html coding through this project. This coding language is the same used on many websites. This project introduces students to coding and helps them to see that it's not as daunting as they may assume. We will be having a parent snack on the week after next to allow parents to experience these stories. Look for details in the latest email I've sent out. Putting on the Finishing Touches
4/20/2018
This week, students focused heavily on two project based learning units. The first unit is a social studies unit focused on the American Revolution. Students are creating "choose your own adventure" stories based on the events of the American Revolution. The project allows students to create alternate histories to show how differently history could have worked out. Not only is this activity important for understanding history, but it helps students understand how even small actions in their own lives can have substantial impacts on the world. The second project based learning unit is focused on science. We have been studying space, and our project will be auctioned off at PNA's annual auction this Saturday. Look for a game called Space Race and please bid on it! Students put a lot of work into it, and it turned out really well! In the pictures below, students are painting the 3D printed game pieces. We moved our classroom outside to take advantage of the nice spring weather. Look at the concentration! You can see the little ships on the cardboard before being painted.
Space Race!
4/15/2018
The annual auction is coming up fast. Next Saturday parents, alumni parents, and other community members will join together to support and celebrate the mission of Pacific Northern Academy. Every year each classroom creates a project with the involvement of students. These projects are then auctioned off, either in the silent auction or the live auction. This year, 5th grade has collaboratively created something really cool... a board game! At PNA, we believe that learning with a purpose, beyond just getting a good score, is vital to maximizing student achievement, retention, engagement, curiosity, and academic enthusiasm. Project-based learning is one of the primary methodologies we utilize in order to achieve this sense of purpose. For our PBL project for our space unit, we planned, designed and created all of the elements of a board game, except the board (created in Photoshop by me), the board pieces (created with a 3D printer by Finn's grandpa), and the board case (Created by PNA parents Charmaine Ng and her husband Johan). Students created what we are calling "entropy cards" that each feature a different celestial object. Each card includes a description of the object as well as something that happens to you in the game that has some connection to the celestial object. We start every unit by filling our PBL project board. This includes a section where students can indicated what they already know, what they need to know in order to successfully complete the project, and a place for any random burning questions that we can explore that relates in some way to the overall topic. Feel free to drop by the classroom to check out what the students have put up. Below is the gameboard that I created with input from the students. This should be a fun game, but you'll have to bid on it at the auction to get your own copy! Morning Meeting MusicHow Big is the Solar System?
4/6/2018
Students have been busy learning about space for the past couple of weeks. Our PBL project for this unit is a complete board game that is loosely based on the Game of Life. I plan to share more details about this project in a future blog once the project is done, but I can tell you it is turning out great. The game is called Space Race, and players navigate through a variety of cosmic obstacles and circumstances in order to make it to the end of the race. Students are really finding our PBL project to be incredibly motivating. This project is not only our PBL project, but it is also our class auction project. It will come with a hand-crafted wood case, game markers created in a 3D printer (with assistance from a student), and all of the cards and rules written and designed by students. You can look forward to seeing that at the auction. In order to help students comprehend the varied distances between the planets, we constructed model of the solar system with the planets spaced to scale. We converted astronomical united to inches/feet. The golf ball is Mercury, which of course is the first planet from the sun. For those who may be a little rusty, next comes Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and then we also included Pluto, despite the fact it has been downgraded to a dwarf planet. The student in black in the distance is standing by Pluto. Students are pointing to the planet that they were personally responsible for. During testing week, we followed our popular tradition of playing games in the gym for 20 minutes before beginning testing. We played a variety of games including Salmon/Bear/Mosquito, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Line Tag. Kids seems to really enjoy having a chance to play with the older kids. Below is a picture of students playing Salmon/Bear/Mosquito. This game works like Rock/Paper/Scissors, where each group of students picks one of the things to be and then runs and tries to tag members of the other team if their character is dominant. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and worked well to get their wiggles out and give them a positive attitude for testing.
5th graders have been immersed in the study of space and astronomy this week. One of today's activities included a debate about a science conspiracy theory. Science these days is subject to a lot of conspiracy theories and other notions that are not backed by scientific evidence, and it's important for students to be able to see the difference between science and conjecture/pseudo-science.
We started our discussion with the question, "Did America really land on the moon?" I polled the class on their opinion, and students indicated their degree of belief with their thumb (what I call their thumb-ometers). A thumbs up indicated the student is confident that America landed on the moon. A thumbs down is confident that America did not land on the moon. Anywhere in between indicated that the student is unsure, but may be leaning one way or another. I polled them regularly throughout the discussion, and students were encouraged to reassess what they think and perhaps change their thumb-ometer. After this first poll, students leaned toward believing that the moon landing happened. After getting students' initial opinion, I played a Youtube video that was peddling the conspiracy theory that we never landed on the moon, and the whole moon landing was actually created in a Hollywood studio. The short video cites a variety of supposed irregularities in the footage of the moon landing footage as their primary evidence, as well as discrediting the integrity of NASA. After the conspiracy theory video, I polled the kids again. Students now mostly indicated with their thumbs that they believed the conspiracy theory that we never landed on the moon. We spent a little time discussing this. Students shared their thoughts and opinions. Next, we watched part of an episode of Mythbusters that debunks the conspiracy theory with tests, recreations, logic, and other forms of solid evidence. I took another poll of the students. The students had now flipped their opinion again, and all of the students have now changed their opinion to a thumbs up. We discussed and debated our opinions again. So, how can we know what is true? We discussed this question next. Students realized the importance of being critical and skeptical. Is it possible to be too critical or critical of the wrong things? We discussed reputable sources backed by expertise and experts, reliable evidence supported by the scientific evidence, and makes sense beyond the surface. Ultimately, it's important for students to not just know scientific facts but to also have the tools to determine what evidence is reliable. Below is a picture of Finn demonstrating the thumb-ometer with a video still of the moon landing in the background. Science Fair
3/23/2018
Today was the science fair at PNA. All 5th grade students participated, and in all there were 43 projects. Students enjoyed the process of exploring something they have been curious about through the scientific method. Below are a few pictures from the last few days. Anchorage Museum
2/23/2018
Below are some pictures from our trip to Anchorage Museum. We toured the Art of the North gallery, studies the technology and innovations of indigenous peoples, toured a temporary exhibit called The Art of Fandom, and participated in a fantastic science class on the states of matter that involved dry ice and liquid nitrogen. It was a fun day!
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Elizabeth FerryMs. Ferry's experiences include teaching with the Peace Corps in Tanzania, teaching high school English in Maine, and this is her second year at PNA. She loves moose, outdoor activities, and being with her students. Archives
April 2021
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