Goodby to the Pod

One last look at Room 5 in the pod. This fall I should be back in a renovated room at Speas School. I'm looking forward to a fresh classroom to start the year.

Boating Reward

Every year Mrs. Schwabe takes students out on her pontoon boat for a reward. She chooses the students who have the highest test scores on the EOG for reading, math, and science and also students who show most growth from 4th grade. This year Eliceo, Lavaryae, Ruben and Jaret were the lucky ones from my class. We had a great afternoon of boating on Belews Lake. The boys swam, tubed, ate dinner, and swam and tubed some more. What a great way to finish 5th Grade!

Dr. Reichert Day

One of our kindergarten teachers, Mrs. Gifford, began planning a celebration to honor Dr. Reichert. Then her baby decided to come early so she wasn't able to participate. We went on with her plans and on May 26th we celebrated the years that Dr. Reichert has been principal at Speas Elementary. Almost everyone wore red and there were speeches and presentations from all grade levels. I think Dr. Reichert was surprised and we hope he enjoyed his day.

EOG Relief

After a week of testing we took our math lesson outside. We threw paper plates to see how far our toss would go. Then we measured the distance of our throws in inches and centimeters. Some students were surprised to see that their plate wouldn't fly like a frisbee. They finally discovered that gentler was better than hard. Back in the classroom we put our data into a stem and leaf plot to determine the median, mode and range of our throws. Having a math lesson outside was a nice break after a week of EOGs.

American Shad Project

We helped Ms. Linhart's class care for American Shad eggs for a few days this spring. The eggs were delivered to Speas on April 26th. We cared for the eggs and watched them hatch. They were so tiny with huge eyes! On Thursday April 29th we took the eggs to Belews Lake for the release. The ones that live will go from the lake to the Dan River to the Roanoke River to the Atlantic Ocean. We hope some of them will come back to Belews Lake in a few years to spawn. We really enjoyed doing this project that was sponsored by the NC Museum of Natural History.

Friction and other Forces

Remember our Science Fair project last fall? How do the things we learned then apply to what we have been talking about in science this quarter?

Roll, Roll, Roll