Barack Obama will be Inaugurated on January 20th-- and F3 is going to watch it live!!!

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View Obama's Inaugural Address!

Here we are making FANTASTIC Gingerbread houses :)

Hello everyone and welcome back! This week will be a short four day week starting off with some MAJOR EXCITEMENT! President-elect Barack Obama will become President Obama at 9:00 am. The teachers in F Pod have set up the room so that all fifth graders will get to watch the inauguration tomorrow morning!

We'll be studying some famous inaugural speeches this week-- and each student will get the chance to discover for themselves the history behind each inaugural speech. At the same time, we'll continue to answer questions that we have about Martin Luther King, Jr., the man whose birthday we are celebrating today.

In science, the class will be continuing to do tests on their stream tables modeling the connections between land and water. Kids already know the terms water cycle, erosion, and deposition. If there are any parents who do work in the field (Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, construction, etc), please let me know.

I hope that everyone is working on Study Island when they get the chance! There is time to work on the reading portion during center time, but there is also a math assignment this week that I would like for students to work on at home.

Cheers!!! -Ms. V.

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a safe a fun break!

Okay, LOTS to catch up on. The last time I saw my awesome fifth graders was the Tuesday before break. We had one fake snow day and two real ones to finish off 2008 before the winter break. That was a bit of a bummer because we had a lot planned for those last few days in F Pod, but we'll get around to the Gingerbread houses soon enough... stay tuned.

This week we'll have a bit of a review on our fractions unit before taking the test on Wednesday. We will start our next science unit after listening to the public service announcements that all of our kids created at the end of 2008. Our next science unit is called Land and Water. We'll be modeling different landforms and learning how the flow of water affects those land forms.

The first Global Reading Challenge contest will be coming up in late February. That gives us less then two months to really focus on those ten books, and build teams in the classroom that work well together, so that they do well in the first round. Check out the Reading Challenge link to check out those ten books.

Speaking of reading, I am looking forward to our next read aloud, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, a work of historical fiction based in a small town in Texas in the late 1960's. Don't worry kids... we will finish Surviving the Applewhites-- probably by Tuesday.

My New Years' resolution (well, one of them anyway), is to blog at least once a week. :) Hold me to it kids! See you tomorrow!!