UNI Interlude Dance

Tai Chi

Thank you to Mr. O'Brien for inviting Tai Chi expert, Joseph Wyse, into our classrooms this week!  Mr. Wyse shared the history of Tai Chi with us and, of course, taught us a few moves, too!

Valentines for Pleasantview

Last week the 5th graders helped to make some homemade valentines for residents at Pleasantview--we had so much fun while doing something kind for others.  We already received a thank you note from Pleasantview saying how much the residents enjoyed the surprise of a homemade valentine!

Sledding in P.E.

Sledding in P.E. with Mrs. Bailey is always a BIG hit--enjoy these pics!

Fun Night Basket

The theme for this year's KE Fun Night Basket will be gift wrap/gift bags.  Send anything that you know YOU would like to have on hand for getting a gift ready.  Things like wrap, gift bags, bows, tape, scissors, ribbons... even cards.   You may start sending these items with your child at any time.   Thank you.

Congrats MP Girls BB!!

Coach Pennington- victory hugs from his sons after the game!

We are so proud of our MP Girls BB team and their coach, Marc Pennington!  They will be playing at the state BB tournament next Tuesday, February 26.  The game is at 3:15.  School will be dismissed at 12:25 (3 hours early).   Many of the girls are Kalona Elementary alumni --- and of course the coach is our Mrs. Pennington's husband... Good luck, Golden Hawks!

Starting IOWA County projects!

We are off and running!  On Monday, all the 5th grade students created a google site for their Iowa County Project.  They will be adding information to this site about their specific county.  This will include pictures, other clip art, links etc.   I will keep you posted on their progress!  In March you will be invited to an "Iowa County Fair" night where they will be presenting their projects.

Interlude Dance

As part of Live Healthy Iowa, and in an effort to get more physical activity, we have decided that during Friday morning announcements the entire school will participate in the UNI Interlude Dance.  This was created by 4 students at UNI and the UNI student section is now famous for this dance.  If you've never seen it, you can check it out at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cuS_31zJ6U#

Your kids LOVE it!!  In fact, they spent their ENTIRE noon recess hitting replay and repeating the dance. . .despite the below zero temperatures outside they were all sweating inside! 

You can also check out a link to our First Lady learning the dance!

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrGoldstein9?v=0cuS_31zJ6U&lr=1

Tai Chi in Chinese

Mr. O'Brien has been taking the last few minutes of class to teach our kiddos some Tai Chi.  He also is working on getting a Tai Chi expert in as a guest speaker to teach the kids even more.  Here are a few photos of their Tai Chi this week!

Math--Negative Numbers

Your child will be bringing home their first math journal from this year.  There are some empty pages or parts of pages that would be GREAT practice now or even over the summer.  We continue our work in unit 7 with the two big ideas being order of operations and negative numbers.  We discussed that negative numbers aren't just for use in math class.  Here are a few places we find negative numbers in the real world. . .
*below sea level
*banking
*stock market
*temperatures (especially this time of year!)
*sports--golf or even a loss of yards in football

Here are a couple of games to help strengthen our understanding of negative numbers:

Number Line Work
http://www.funbrain.com/linejump/

Ordering Positive and Negative Numbers
http://www.mathplayground.com/numberballs.html

Adding/Subtracting Positive and Negative Numbers
http://www.mathplayground.com/ASB_SpiderMatchIntegers.html

And here are a couple of games to review Order or Operations which we spent a couple of days learning about this week:

Order of Operations Millionaire
http://www.math-play.com/Order-of-Operations-Millionaire/order-of-operations-millionaire.html

Several Links to Order of Operations Games
http://classroom.jc-schools.net/basic/math-order.html

Science--matter

We continue our investigations with matter--we had AMAZING discussions about the characteristics of solids this week in science.  They were given a tub of items (crayon, wooden block, plastic, paper, tin foil, marshmallow, etc) and had to decide if all the items were solids and they had to decide what a solid is.  At first most students said solids are hard, but then began the discussion about the marshmallow--that one item caused us to think very critically. . .after hearing lots of good and different points we decided that solid keeps its shape unless an outside force or energy acts on it.  Negotiation is not only sharing what you think, but also listening to the ideas of others; this sometimes causes us to change our own ideas.  We first negotiated with ourselves by writing down our own ideas, then discussed with a small group before negotiation in a more "public" (class) setting.  We decided that, yes, we can squish the marshmallow, but it requires our energy, just like we could saw a board in half.  Later next week we will being to set up our own investigations and tests in matter.