Mrs. Nygren's First Grade Class

Our teacher's name is Mrs. Nygren.  The class has some very active kids some very calm kids.  Some kids our sharing time some do not.  In our class we sit "1964 style".  Do you wonder what this is?

We like many things in our classroom. We like watching movies about penguins on the smart board.  We like doing art projects.  We made finger paint with food coloring and corn syrup.  Then we ate it!  What do you think it tasted like?

We read many books in our book boxes.  We know reading is a good brain activity and makes you very smart.  One of our favorite books is Dazzle the Dinosaur and Dinosaur Babies. 

Mrs. Henk's Third Grade Class

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Mrs. Henk's Third Grade Class

by Preeyal and Aveya

In science, we have been learning about energy. So far, we have mainly worked with sound energy.  Sounds are caused by vibrations, which are rapid back and forth movements.  We watched a tuning fork vibrate. It vibrated so much that when it was put into water, the water splattered out. We worked with sounds through solids, where we scratched a stick, sounds through water, where we used a stethoscope, and sounds through air, using a tuning fork.

In engineering, we are learning and making sounds in different ways.  We made ear harps and sound sandwiches.  The pitch, how high or low the sound is, can be changed by how long or loose the vibrating part of the object is.  If it is long and loose, it is a lower pitch, and if it is tight or short, it is a higher pitch.

A mechanical engineer from 3M came to talk with the third graders.  He talked about a lot of interesting things.  He showed us how sound travels through a spring.  First, he held both ends and then he yanked one side and stopped.  We saw the vibrations travel along the spring.  He also showed us a machine that measured hertz.  He told us that some animals are able to hear higher or lower pitches than human beings can. The unit of measurement for pitch is hertz.  Most of the students could hear up to 16,000 hertz, until they couldn’t hear anything.  He also showed us a video about human ears. We have hairs in our ears that vibrate and make the sounds that go to our brain.  If you put ear buds in your ears and listen to loud sounds, it can hurt your eardrum, or the little hairs in your ears will lie flat.  Some ear hairs will recover and some won’t.

In literacy, we have been working on nonfiction text features, main ideas, comparing and contrasting, fact and opinion, cause and effect, and summarizing.  Some students are working in groups on presentations about light and sound energy or about people who were pioneers in light and sound energy.

Exploring Motion in 2nd Grade

Mrs. Schoenbauer's class is exploring motion all day long.  We explored roller coasters.  Roller coasters can go fast and slow.  It was important to be safe so the roller coaster had to stay on the track.  The roller coaster needs a force either a push or a pull motion to make it go.  Friction helps the roller coaster slow down.  It was fun to design the roller coaster.  It was challenging to build because it was important to make sure the roller coaster was fun and interesting for the passenger.  Sometimes the design wouldn't work so we had to make it better and fix it.  We worked in groups for this project and we had to have extra good teamwork while designing our coaster.  We also had to be creative and come up with an interesting name for our roller coaster.

Our class went to the Minnesota Science Museum.  We explored the exhibits as a group.  We studied about motion at the museum. We learned about systems and how they worked. We saw Tornado Alley in the Omnitheater.  The seats were cool, they reclined and the screen came down in front of us.  We also saw the dinosaurs and the mummy.  There were so many cool exhibits to explore.  One of our favorites was the violin you played to see the sound waves.  Another was the tornado, if you put your hand in it, it would be wrecked.  We also saw magnets and how it is part of Nano Technology.  The whole trip was fun!

Some questions we still have about motion are:
1. What are Newton's Three Laws of motion?
2.  Why is Newton's third law so important?
3.  If you're going slow, how do you go fast?
4.  Why motion so important?
5.  Why do some things need electricity to move?
6.  How do you make the ball stay on the track?

We hope you will help us answer these questions!!!

Planting Seeds in Kindergarten

Mrs. Stenzel's Kindergaten class blogged "all about" the grass seeds.  Read what the students wrote below:

1.  We put soil in the can.
2.  We put in the grass seeds.
3.  We watered the seeds.
4.  We put the can in the sun.
5.  We continued to water the seeds.