Friday 5/7/04 Reported & Photographed by Katie

Everyone came into Room 12 excited for the day to begin. The board read: "Have Study Link 10.8 and spelling page 129 ready to turn in." Number two on the board asked us to look at our Interactive Story rubric. Interactive Stories are stories that we create on our handheld computers. Each person’s story has six different endings. They take an extremely long time to make and we have been working on them since the beginning of April! When we were looking over our rubric, everyone was really chatty (and I mean really chatty because Mr. Vincent put up five sad faces). Mr. Vincent keeps a tally chart on the chalkboard labeled happy faces and sad faces. This tally chart helps him keep track of our recesses. If we have more happy faces than sad, then we get an extra recess. Now onto Math. Today in Math we learned how to find the area, perimeter, and circumference of circles. Mr. Vincent gave us a choice to make: we could make a spreadsheet on our handhelds, or we could do three Math Boxes and a page in our Math Journal. Many students chose to make a spreadsheet because four pages in our Math Journal was way too much work. After the spreadsheet was completed, we had to do a page in our Math Journal anyway. Following Math, we had gym. In gym we practiced relays to get ready for Track and Field Day at Millard West. Then we played a game called "Man from Mars." From here, we transferred into W.A.R.T. materials. W.A.R.T. Stands for Writing and Reading Time. We read a T.F.K (Time for Kids) about the Olympics. Then, Mr. Vincent handed out a worksheet about the T.F.K. Once we finished up W.A.R.T., the fifth grade started walking to Russell for Middle School Orientation. As soon as we got there we ate lunch. The lunch was a slice of cheesy pizza, warm French fries, fresh fruit, and a delicious milkshake! Aaron even said, "I think that Russell's food is the best school lunch." After lunch everyone scrambled into the gym to watch a welcome video that the teachers had put together. Then we had a passing period for specials. This is when you would spend a little time at each special's room and the teacher would tell you a little about each class. Some of the specials were Art, Computer Lab, Food Lab, the Chorus and Band room, and Industrial Tech. Then we had another passing period when we would go to all of the main classes. Some of them were Science, Math, Language Arts, Study Hall and more. Sadly, we had to leave, but every person that came left with a Russell packet that told us more about our new school. When we were finished with Russell, we walked back to Willowdale, got to our classroom, and took out our spelling books because it was time for spelling. Spelling was short; all we had was a worksheet for Lesson 31. After that we had Science. We didn't have much of Science either, but we did get to watch a Brain Pop Movie on Mr. Vincent's laptop. The Brain Pop was about gravity. Moving on we had one of the last subjects of the day; it was Teacher Read. In Teacher Read, Mr. Vincent read us a book called Crash. He read about a boy named Crash who found out that his grandpa might stay at Crash's house for good. There was only five minutes left in the day and everyone was eager to leave school for a nice warn weekend. Mr. Vincent said that we could do some ruler balancing against him for the last five minutes. He chose one person to come to the front of the room to challenge him, but of course no one could beat Mr. Vincent (he is an expert balancer). Finally, the bell rang and everybody rushed out of the classroom in a hurry. We had an awesome day! Back