As you may have heard your child talking about, the intermediates have the great privilege of having the use of a class set of Chromebooks. Chromebooks are a wonderful tool that can be used and will be used for a variety of activities. Chromebooks are inexpensive laptops that are fast and very easy to use. They are also very secure. The kids have been really enjoying and we have been using them for learning about coding, doing class polls on a variety of questions and for our writing.

The word processing tools developed by Google are perfect tools to use for our writing program. Unlike a program like Microsoft Word, the Google Docs writing program is a slimmed down writing tool that is really easy for the students to use. One of the nice features of the Google Docs tool is that it is a very collaborative environment. Students and I can work right within the document at the same time to make comments, fix areas that need attention and chat about their work in progress. These tools have a lot of potential and I am very excited to see where it leads us.

Our writing this year is going to take us through a wide number of areas. Our goal is to start with small paragraphs and work on building the small paragraphs into larger pieces of writing by focusing on adding details, interesting words, and other elements. We want to start small so students are not overwhelmed. We will start by looking at Ideas and how we develop ideas; from coming up with a single writing idea to how to expand on that idea to include related ideas. Last day, we started off by discussing what makes a good story and the students definitely knew the elements that made a good piece of writing. The trick will be to get the students to recognize that in their own writing. 🙂

Writing is one of the hardest things students learn to do in school. It involves almost a whole body and brain effort.

In Science, students are just about done their Designs for their Oobleck machines. Students had spent some time discussing the properties of Oobleck as part of replicating a scientific convention. Using those agreed upon properties, students designed and drew machines that could survive on a planet full of Oobleck. Next, we will be learn about how scientists use the same process to investigate questions, build knowledge and create things to deal with problems. Hopefully students will learn that what they are doing and will be doing in Science this year, is exactly what real scientists do everyday.