1st Day of SBAC and Science

Your children showed tremendous perseverance, focus and stamina today for our SBAC testing.  We have started with English Language Arts.  Your open minded children enjoyed many of the reading passages and were telling me about all the interesting facts they learned about animals, history and science!  I have to say the SBAC test does a nice job of finding engaging text to use!  Nobody finished this first test and I praised them for that.  We will continue our work tomorrow with English Language Arts.  On Thursday and Friday we will work on the second part of the English Language Arts test which involves reading many passages about a topic and writing a longer informational, opinion or narrative piece!  We hope to have both tests complete by Friday!

Many of your children talked about our Matter Unit at Conferences.  Here are some photos of the experiments we did to test if kitchen substances were acidic.

We have begun our final unit of the year involving Ecosystems!  We have read many picture books about ecosystems and our vocabulary list is growing quite long.  Some of the words we will focus on are:

Food Chains, Carnivore, Herbivore, Omnivore, Consumer, Producer, Abiotic, Biotic, Prey, Predator, Cycle, Erosion, Pollution, Adaptations, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Turbidity, Physical, Chemical, Biological, Pervious, Impervious, Best Management Practices, Point Source and No Point Source and Watershed.  Today educators from the Watershed Alliance joined us at took us through the Lake Champlain Watershed.  We used a watershed model to explore the use of our lands in and around waterways.  We looked at how pollutants travel into our our waterways and ended the session looking for ways to reduce pollution.  

Lastly,here is a slideshow of some student writing involving the word Respect!