I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! I had a great Friday at a conference in Vancouver. I spent all day talking and learning about technology in the class and learned some great things. Mostly, it reaffirmed to me what we are doing in the classroom with technology and all the things that can still be done. On a technology note, I have set up the students with their own e-mails for use with Animoto. If you remember, students have been creating their own videos using this really neat site. If you click on the videos category on the left side, you will be able to see some of them. I have explained to students that these e-mails are for animoto use only. All the e-mails are connected to my e-mail so that I am able to track what they are doing. One one else has access to these videos or emails except for me.

It was a busy day today. I can’t believe it is May already. Only a short time left and still so much to do. Today we started some new poems. One was about a snake and the other was about things they like including bugs. Students saw a picture of a big and spent some time describing them. After that, the students used a template to describe something they liked whether it was bugs, pizza or something different. Students also go their spelling lists today though we had a bit of a rough beginning as I started giving them a list they had already done. So we had to re-start but quickly got through the right words. At least they recognized them!

For science today, we had a great time measuring the sizes of the Sun, Earth and Moon. What a discovery! Using a scale model ruler, students measured the diameter of each star and planet. Students discovered that the diameter of the Sun was 1,380,000 km, the moon was 3500 km and the Earth was 15,000 km!! We really got an appreciation of the size of the Sun and it’s only a medium sized star! Tomorrow, we will discover why the Sun appears to be the same size as the moon when it is so obviously not!!!!

Parents . ..Just to lay out some ideas I have, I am working on sharing information on Internet Safety and Friendships over the next few blog entries so keep an eye out for those.