Monkeys Visit Our School

Mike wrote about our assembly yesterday:

Yesterday at school we had some special visitors.  They were MONKEYS!  We learned a lot from the “monkey guy”.  Monkeys should not be kept as pets.  To get one you have to get a special permit.

New world monkeys are different in shape, size, and color and they can be a pain.  The older one that came would not follow directions, she would throw her food especially mushrooms, and she would take the other monkeys food. 

Baby pygmy marmoset monkeys are small.   We saw one that only weighed 8 oz. and was the size of a pop can.   They don’t get to much bigger than that.  Their body length is between 130 to 370 mm or 5-14 inches long, and their tail is between to 150 to 420 mm or 6-15 inches long.  

Japanese macaque monkeys are medium sized.   They are found living in cold regions of the world. They are the world’s most northern living monkey species.  They adapt incredibly to their surroundings.

It was a very fun assembly (funny too), and we liked it!  

Day of Blogging 12.12.12

We took part in a special day of blogging with classes across the country and around the world.  Our whole class compiled this list of places they'd like to visit.  Some students wrote individual posts about their favorite things.  Please feel free to comment, but only use students' first names.  Thank you, Mrs. Tharp

Places our class would like to visit:

The Titanic museum,  Hollywood, Splash Lagoon (Hotel with water slide), The mall, Florida (Universal studios and the beach), Paris, Germany, Chicago, New York City, Hawaii, Washington DC. and Canada.  We dream big!

Fort Niagara Field Trip

We went on a field trip to Fort Niagara while we were reading the book The Gold Laced Coat.  It is a great book and they tailored our tour of the fort to include parts from the book.  Our class just loves history so this has been very fun to tie it to ELA.  We took a second field trip to follow the path that the characters in the book had to travel.  We went from the fort to Niagara Falls.  Thankfully Mrs. Tharp didn't make us walk!  We took a poll and it was much longer than we imagined it when we read it in the book.  Then we walked around the falls.  We took pictures and used the flip cams to take video.  We loved taking pictures and videos.  We are going to put them together into an animoto video.   We will post it when it is done!

International Dot Day

Our class participated in International Dot Day this year.  We had fun talking about ways that we can Make our Mark and Make it Matter.  We were fortunate to be able to participate in a live stream of Peter Reynolds reading his book The Dot.  It was the first time that we did something like this and we weren't sure how the technology would work, but everything went smoothly.  We even had some visitors stop in and join us.  It was a fun day!

New School Year, New Technology!

We started the year with some wonderful new technology this fall.  We received a promethean board. It  is an interactive whiteboard like a smart board, but Mrs. Tharp says that it is "smarter".  As she and Mrs. Reed learn how to use it, we look forward with excitement to see what each new day will bring.  Our school also received a portable laptop lab that all of our classes share.   We are good at taking turns with the computers in our room, but when we have the lab everyone can be on a computer at the same time!