Today all the fifth graders made gingerbread houses. Almost everyone brought in different candy and Graham crackers. Some of people used both their own and other people’s candy. While others just used their own. I saw someone needed to use someone’s candy to make things he couldn't make with his own candy.
We used milk cartons for the house. We put graham crackers on the milk cartons and used icing or frosting as the “glue” to hold them on. Then we put the candy on the houses to make them look fancy.
We also had to make up a name for our houses. I named mine Andy Land because my name is Andy. It is kind of like Candy Land, but without the letter C.
We had a lot of fun making our new candy homes.

“Beep, beep, beep,” went the robots that the Robotics’ students showed us today.
Each robot they showed us today cost around 200 to 300 dollars! There were 6, that is $12,000! I do not think I have that kind of money! I hope no one breaks one!
The robots learned their programs kind of like we play the game “Telephone,” a game where we pass the message on to the next person by whispering a message. The robots kind of did the same thing and at the end the last robot (Brandon’s robot ) played a song and drove around in circles.
Next we watched as they showed us who’s Lego machine “robot” could make it up the ramp the farthest.
Then Charlie showed us how the gears on the robot worked. Uh oh, Charlie’s ran out of battery!
Robotics looks and sounds cool, but also very complicated!

In math we are learning about graphing so today we made a bar graph. We made it about our favorite after school snacks. Our choices were a cookie, a granola bar, a candy bar, fruit and other. “Other” won by a few a votes. Second place was a tie between cookie and fruit with five votes each, third was a candy bar with two votes, and last was a granola bar with one. We only had twenty-two children in our class today while we were doing this activity.
Bar graphs are my favorite thing to do in math, so I had fun today in school. I can’t wait to see what other graphs we create!

"Celebrate You And Me was the name of our awesome concert/musical we performed twice today! The first performance was at 2:30 P.M. in front of the whole school. The second was at 7:00 P.M. sharp in front of our parents. They were both held in the school gym.
“I’m feeling kind of nervous!” stated Brandon before the big show.
I thought the concerts were amazing. We had around 75 of us performing in both of them. There were nine skits and eight incredible songs.
My favorite song was the superb song, "You Know It Takes a Little Faith."
So in conclusion the fifth graders (we) spent hours of work and practice to do the tremendous performances today, well so did Miss Carlsen! Good Job!!

Today in reading it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop! Well, okay, not that quiet!
The kids who were in choir had a field trip to sing Downtown, but we still took the reading test, read our Time for Kids, and then answered questions about what we read.
So, even though about two-thirds of our class wasn't here today, we still had an almost normal schedule in reading.

Today’s two art projects were fun! We usually only do one art project,! but this time we did two!
To start Ms. Sanborn asked us what objects we put on our old art project, which was a winter theme. We came up with tons of ideas. I was wondering why she had us tell her that. But then she finally told us what the project was. We were supposed to get a clear cylinder shaped container. Then she told us we were going to make something out of it using paint. She suggested doing Santa, a penguin, a snowman or a reindeer. Ms. Sanborn said to just paint it the base color for now. Then she told us the second project. We had to color or paint two tongue depressors. One was for our First Grade buddy and the other one was for us. Ms. Sanborn gave us lots of examples from last year’s class. Some of the people did Santa Claus, Christmas trees, presents and candy canes.
Joey said, "This project is easy.''
Then she gave us over a half an hour of work time to get started. So today in art we started two fun, creative art projects.

Today in gym we had to practice for the musical we are having on Thursday, December 14. It was kind of fun, but a little hard.
It was a little hard because we are not doing that well and we only have two more days. I hope when we do the concert/musical I we do really well.
Today Miss Carlson was a little tired of us not being loud enough. I don’t blame her. We do need to be loud and good during the concert or no one will hear it.
That’s what we did today for an hour, practice and work really hard singing and practice lines. I hope everyone will enjoy the concert on Thursday.

This is Montana, the Roving Reporter, here to tell you what we did in “Super Science” today.
The first thing we did was get out our science notebooks and science textbooks. We reviewed our notes we took yesterday and talked about them aloud. Then we read in our textbook Lessons 3 and 4. Lesson 3 was about weathering and Lesson 4 was about erosion.
Our assignment for science was to write 7 notes regarding those two lessons. After we were finished, we were able to watch a movie. Not just any movie, but a science movie with Bill Nye the Science Guy about the Earth’s Crust. It was good.
In conclusion, it was a fun day of learning about science.

Robots? 5th grade students can make and control robots, you ask? The answer is yes!
Today a few members of the class went to Robotics class. Robotics is a special class that teaches kids how to program and build robots. Sounds pretty adventurous, huh?
We are building our robots out of legos with gears and computer-designed commands, such as “go forward”, then “turn around”, then “play music” and “flash the lights”. There are also light sensors on the bottom of the robot that read how much light is in different colors that it moves over. You can tell the robot to stop when it reaches a certain intensity of light.
At Robotics today we finished a fun activity where we had to program the robot to move forward 16 gear pegs the first time. (Gear pegs are the little spokes around the gear.) The second thng we had to make it do was go all the way up to 96 pegs and then we had to measure how long the distances were. I really enjoyed that. The third thing we did in class was a maze (this was my favorite part!). Our teacher, Mrs. Bean had put tape on poster board to make a maze. We had to program our robots to go around the maze trying not to touch the tape marks. I got about halfway through it before we had leave the class. I have to say it was the best robotic class I have had all year!
As you can see Robotics is very fun to do, amazing to think about, and cool to see. We have a grand ole’ time in Robotics.

Today we listened to the 5th grade band play for us at lunch and they did really well.
The first thing that they played was “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The second thing they played was “Hot Cross Buns.”
“That was awesome!” Commented Omar. “It was a lot of fun to get to play those songs!”
Suman thought that the reason people liked it so much was because of the good music, good lunch, and they got to sit on the benches at the tables. The band played at 12:50, which was 5th grade’s lunchtime. They performed at lunch so everyone would be comfortable and not have to sit on the very hard floor. Everyone had a lot of fun at the concert, moms and dads even showed up.
That was an awesome lunchtime treat.

On Wednesdays our class draws, paints, and does all kinds of other things because we have art. We have had many art projects and today we had another one! Can you guess what we learned about and then drew? I'll give you a hint, it is a flower/plant you see mostly this time of year…well, and I’ll tell you! We drew a poinsettia.
Did you know poinsettias are native to Mexico? Here's another fact, poinsettias are not poisonous. Who knew that? For more facts go to: http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/poinsettia/facts.html
Andria said that she thought the project was fun but a little hard to draw the flower and bracts. Bracts are the red leaf looking things. I thought it was entertaining and a little hard at the same time, but at least my mom has one and I knew what they looked like for real.
So later on you can look on our website and see our pictures that we drew and colored of poinsettias!

The Russell Middle School concert today was so fun! There was all sorts of great music from the Russell strings, their jazz band, and their swing choir. We got to hear all three groups perform.
Well, first the Strings were very good. Their first song was from the Revolutionary War. There was a great solo by someone who was on the violin. Their second song had a Mexican theme.
Next we watched the Russell Swing Choir who did a fantastic job on their songs! They did mostly Christmas songs like, “Let it Snow”, “Rudolph” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” They even had a few kids dressed up!
Finally was my favorite.....THE JAZZ BAND! The jazz band did such a great job! My favorite was a piece called "Area 51." It was AMAZING! In it the drummer had to do such a cool solo! It was sweet!
After that amazing concert I was really in the Christmas mood!

"You and Me" is the musical that we, the lucky fifth graders get to perform next week.
Today was the first fantastic rehearsal with all of the fifth graders and what parts we got.
Morgan C., Lindsey R., and Taylor W. got the solos. Miss. Carlsen said, "Everyone did such a fantastic job at the tryouts that it literally came down to a draw from a hat".
I think that Miss. Carlsen is doing a great job on our musical. I am sure that it will turn out to be a wonderful and meaningful performance! I hope the parents and the whole school has as much fun watching it as we are getting ready and performing it.

Bua ha ha ha ha! With science at our side we will rule the world! Well, we aren't mad scientists, but we learned a pithy of things. Did you know that the white puff coming out of airplanes are ice crystals? I sure didn't, neither did many other people, but we had good guesses. Kaitlyn guessed "Condensation" which I would have said, too. I also heard "cloud" and "cumulus" which are logical guesses.
We didn't just learn about how ice crystals come out of planes, like I said, we learned a pithy of other things. Anyone who works with weather would know what we learned about. Now we know barometers, anemometers, rain gauges, hygrometers, Doppler radar towers, and weather stations all help predict weather.
Climate and weather faced off in our science book, the difference is that weather is everything happening at one time and climate is weather recorded over usually 30 years.
Speaking of climate and weather, we learned what could affect the two. Low air pressure means more moisture in the air and higher air pressure means drier air.
A few things, which knew, can affect climate? Landforms and oceans are some, then there's carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, volcanoes, asteroids, and meteors that do, too.
I learned a lot from science, I hope you did from this report. For our fellow fifth graders, there was an extra study point besides science hidden in the first paragraph, can you find it...or did you already spot it?
Science was stuffed with tons of learning in and out of the classroom, so next time you look up, think about what's really going on.

Today in science we got to share the notes we wrote. They were about what we read about in Chapter 8 lesson 1 from our science books. After we got done sharing our interesting facts we got straight to work, reading from the books. We read lessons 2 and 3. After we got done reading we went back to our notebooks. Ms. Sanborn wanted us to write seven more notes to help us remember what we read for the test next week.
So that’s what we did in science.