French: La Journée en Français

C'était une journée formidable ! I had a wonderful year teaching your hardworking, hilarious, intelligent, and creative daughters French. Bonnes vacances !

Google Expeditions

Students in grade 1st-5th explored augmented reality through Google Expeditions.  In fifth grade, students observed various systems of the human body.

Spring Performance

Below are the links to the 5th Grade's Spring Performance.  Enjoy!

Performance from the Stage

Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes:  Speed View

Art_The Parts at Play

Each class moves the project along...

Cutting out the "light" shapes of the loon.

Piecing the "elements" together to make the box. 

Making foxgloves for the foreground of the scenery. 

Attaching the sticks to the daylight puppets. 

Art_The Fifth Grade Performance

Each year the fifth grade puts on a stage performance of art and music integration. Every year it is completely different but there is always a message, original art, and music written by the students. The inspiration for this year's performance is a story from the NorthWest First Nations tradition. How the Loon Lost Her Voice is an origins tale that explains why things are the way they are. There are 6 main animal characters, evil spirits, and the theme of dark and light. 

To accentuate the light and dark theme, the girls are telling the story with shadow puppets. They designed the puppets and crafted two sets - the animals in daylight and the animals in the darkness. They brainstormed ideas of how to tell the story with visuals, light, acting, music, and words. 

Here they are making and testing their prototypes. 

Here is a record of the leading discussion about the message of the story and how to convey the message with art elements. 

After building mini models, they used the "real" materials to build the final versions. 

Roanoke: The Lost Colony

The girls are hard at work analyzing primary source documents to develop and support theories about what happened to the settlers of Roanoke. This is one of our country's oldest mysteries. Will our Mawrtians solve it?!

French: Le Meilleur Pâtissier

Before Spring Break, the girls practiced, memorized, and filmed skits where they played contestants on the French baking show, Le Meilleur Pâtissier. They used their knowledge of the verb être and of adjectives, places, prepositions, time, and more to understand, pronounce, and perform the skits. They did fantastic jobs and I always love seeing their acting chops!

I have shared your daughter's video with her on GoogleDrive so that she can view it on her own time and show it to family and friends. Enjoy!

The Amazing Human Body

We have been learning about the human body in science. We started by studying the cell to discover how it works. Then we went on to explore the skeletal system and the muscles to see how they operate. Dissecting a chicken leg allowed us to actually look at real bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage.

Once we saw how these vital parts operated together to allow movement for an animal, it was our turn to try to imitate nature. We were given an assortment of materials and were challenged to make a working model of a human arm. We checked the rubrics to see what was expected, and then started by constructing a prototype out of cardboard. We quickly found that this was more difficult than it looked! We solved problems as they came up and then had an Engineers' Meeting to share our models, our problems, and our solutions with our fellow engineers.

Creating the prototypes first helped us as we worked on our final models. These were made out of foam board. Though we all were given similar materials, we found that we came up with a variety of designs. We had fun with the project and gained a renewed respect for how well our bodies operate!