Marble Maze Challenge "How Slow Can You Go?"

When students arrived Monday they were faced with a new challenge: Who can make the slowest marble maze???

They were told to brainstorm ways they could do this and to research the Laws of Motion to see if these could help them when creating their mazes. 

Newton's Laws of Motion: 

1. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

2. The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.

3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

After investing what these laws meant and how they could apply them to their own mazes, I had students construct blue prints of the mazes so they would know what materials they would need to bring from home. 

Next, the students constructed marble mazes out of plastic equipment so they could get the idea of what materials from home they may have similar to this, they really enjoyed this! 

These were the winners from the first marble maze challenge with materials already supplied....we will see who wins the next challenge with materials brought in from home. 

Today we started building with the items brought from home, the students had a lot of great ideas so I can't wait to see the final products. The final Marble Maze race will be on May 27th. 

Book Reviews in Book Clubs

Bridge To Terabithia
By: Aaron Williams
I like Bridge To Teribithia because Jess Aarons is determined to get up early every morning and run. Also because that he has a dream he wants to beat Wayne Pettis, another reason I like this book is because there is a new girl in school and she is getting picked on so on the bus Jess Aarons sits beside her and talks to her. On the bus Jess Aarons said I have to run an errand for my mom. Then close to Christmas Jess said to Leslie meet me at the castle stronghold on Christmas eve afternoon. At the stronghold Jess gave Leslie a puppy. Then later In the book Leslie dies and then Jess starts to run past the old perkins place and through Washington and milsburg. Starts running even faster when he sees his dads pickup truck.  I would recommend this book to everyone.

Book Clubs at a 4th Grade Hall Way Near YOU!

CHOICE 

When starting book clubs this is the question we pondered on, do we give the students a choice of what to read or just assign books to certain groups? We decided that if we wanted the students to have a love for reading we must first give them the choice of what they want to read, what interests them, what makes them WANT to go home every night and pick up the book to read and then tell
their friends about.
We started out with each teacher picking around 10 books for the class to choose from and then after reading the book jacket for each book the group would decide on which one they wanted to read. We never expected the students to be SO excited about reading a book! Students were also given 5 jobs to pick from in each group that they wanted pursue for a certain time period, everyone worked very well sorting out the jobs and deciding who would be the best at what. When students got their jobs they immediately took action and started doing what they could to make sure they did their best to provide for their group.

These are the different jobs students could choose from: 

Stellar Summarizer

Word Wizard

Artful Artist 

Literary Luminary

Director 

I won't explain the jobs just yet, I will let the students blog about their jobs because they really are important to them and they are doing wonderful taking responsibility for the things their job requires.



Here are the books the students chose and some pictures from our first week doing Book Clubs. Each Friday one student volunteers to bring snacks for his/her group and they have a group discussion on the papers they filled out on their book and what they thought was interesting about the book so far.
At first we were a little worried about discussions going on other than book club discussions but that has deficiently not been the case! Students are so engaged and eager to share with their peers and they can't wait to discuss what they have learned or what questions they still have. Stay tuned for the students to blog about their books in the upcoming weeks.