Hurricane Sandy

Most of the schools in coastal New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York have been closed this week due to the historic Hurricane Sandy. Much of the Jersey shore, as well as Long Island and Staten Island were destroyed from the powerful winds and storm surge.
Many lives have been lost, people have been left homeless, and our beloved New Jersey beaches have suffered severe erosion. Hopefully our schools will open next weeks,so students can return to a normal routine.

ABCYA.com

In preparation for Halloween, our primary classes have been completing virtual pumpkin carving and Halloween word searches on the site abcya.com. Students and teachers are very enthusiastic about this website because it contains literacy, math, science, and technology tasks for children in grades kindergarten through five. There are also interactive holiday links, and even a short video about cyber safety. I highly recommend this website to parents and teachers because of the abundance of quality activities.

Totem Pole Project

After studying about Native Americans in Social Studies class, fifth grade students viewed a youtube video about totem poles in Alaska. We also researched the myths and stories surrounding these totem poles. Students then used clip art and google images to create a totem pole illustrating the story of their life. They then wrote myths to explain the history of the images on their totem poles.

Author project

What is a scientist? After some on-line and print research, sixth grade students chose a famous scientist and organized a snapshot of the scientist's life on a software program called Timeliner. They also used Inspiration, which is a graphic organizer program, for note taking. The Inspiration project was exported to power point, and after adding images and what I call "bells and whistles," the students presented their reports to the class.

Technology and Science Curriculum Integration

Since many of the science standards also are integrated with technology standards, we have been creating projects which will satisfy both curricular areas. In third grade this week, classroom teachers used www.brainpopjr.com to review the steps of the scientific method. During technology classes, we used abcya.com to design a robot on the computer. Students then saved this image, and next week will copy the design to Microsoft Word and write the steps used in the design process to create their robot.