Rube Goldberg Contraptions

Check out our Rube Goldberg projects in action!

MVI 0628 from JenZ on Vimeo.

Rube Goldberg Construction

Today was the coolest day yet; we made a Rube Goldberg project using common house hold matirials. We also learned that you'd have to make many revisions before your final results. The Rube Goldberg devices were complicated and fun at the same time. We did things like turning on lights, cracking eggs, cleaning dirty golfballs, hole punching papers, and other simple things we made complicated. 
The best part about this was the scientific thinking and processes involved.  Regardless of whether our experiment worked or not, we leaned a lot!

Meet the 5th Grade Learning Chefs!

Fifth graders have had an excellent first two weeks back in gifted class! We began our first day reviewing our "Daily Menu" and got right to work. First on the menu was our "Brain Boggler." This is a critical and creative thinking sheet we will do each day to exercise our brains.  Be sure to check out your child's brain boggler sheet in their binder. We talked about our school "Recipe for Success" theme and after discussion about ingredients for a great year students wrote their own personal "recipe" for their school year. Ask your child what ingredients they chose. What day in the "kitchen" would be complete without making tasty treats? We created our own trail mix and we talked about what ingredients each item represented (goldfish=teamwork; marshmallows= kindness; pretzel sticks=we stick togther, m&m's=fun, etc.) What a yummy and fun activity!
Today we learned about a cartoonist named Rube Goldberg. Rube Goldberg was known for taking a simple task and making it extraordinarily complicated. Rube Goldberg drew cartoons of contraptions such as – an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles and live animals. He had solutions for How To Get The Cotton Out Of An Aspirin Bottle, imagined a Self-Operating Napkin, and created a Simple Alarm Clock to name a few. Our plan is to sketch our own cartoons and eventually build our own Rube Goldberg contraptions. We can't wait!

Iditarod 2012

Check out this year's route and find out more about this year's mushers: 
http://www.adn.com/2012/01/18/2270467/iditarod-2012-map.html

This week in Fourth Grade Gifted, we learned all about certain types of columns. Columns are arechitectrural support items. Architecture is the art of designing buildings and studying how the buildings are created. Columns are used to support certain structures, perhaps roofs, things like that.Columns became famous for their use in the Greek Golden Age of Architecture. There are three different types or "orders" of Columns: Doric, the Doric column has no embellishments or flourishments on the Capital (The top of a Column) and on the Base (The bottom of the Column), Ionic, embellishments start to get very noticable, sort of looking to me like a moustache or cinammon bun, both at the Capital and the Base, and Corinthian. The Crinthian Column has the most ornate embellishments and carvings on both the Base and Capital. We measured varius dimensions of Paper-Columns, and stacked books on them and recorded our data. There were many Variales that affected how many books were stacked on the Paper-Columns. For example, the thickness of the books. Those who stacked thin books on their Columns resulted in a large number of books. My group stacked books varying from 200 to 300 page books, our maximum ammount of books being only ten.
Written by: Conor Naccarato

Iditarod- 3rd Grade Unit Resources

To learn more about the Iditarod check out the following links:
http://iditarod.com/

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/iditarod/

To learn more about Sled Dogs check out these sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sled_dog
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/sleddogs/index.html


To learn more about other breeds of dogs, check this out:
http://www.akc.org/breeds/index.cfm?nav_area=breeds
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/

Battle of the Books!!

The list is out!  Have you started reading yet?  Check out some of these great titles for this year's Battle of the Books.  If you have read any of them leave your comments and recommendations here for your friends. 

The 100-Year-Old-Secret by: Tracy Barrett
Xena and Xander Holmes think living in London will be boring.  One afternoon they are handed a cryptic note that leads them to a hidden room-and a secret society.  When they discover they are related to Sherlock Holmes and inherit his unsolved casebook, life becomes so much more exciting! Click on the link above to watch a video trailer for the book.

The Magic Half by Annie Barrows
Eleven-year-old Miri Gill fells left out in her family, which has two sets of twins and her, until she travels back in time to 1935 and discovers Molly, her own lost twin, and brings her back to the present day. Click on the book title to watch a video trailer!