5SW

VOKI

Recently in the computer lab our class experienced with a very exciting website called Voki. Voki is a website where you can create a character and make them talk. There were lots of different categories such as dogs, cats, classic, toons, animals, edgy, anime, oddballs, random, VIPs, politics, and holiday. In each category you choose a person or thing and you can make them crazy looking or you can make them look like yourself. You can also give them facial hair, different clothes, and accessories. There is a section where you can make your character very personal by giving them different bodies, heights, and widths. You can change the color of the eyes, mouth, skin, and hair of your Voki. You can also give your Voki a different back round so it fits or clashes with your character. After you are done creating your Voki you can make it talk. You can either record your own voice or type in what you want your Voki to say. To top it off you can decide what language or what accent that you want your Voki to translate your message in.

I know this sounds like so much fun and it is. To create a Voki of your own, you can visit www.voki.com and create!

Get a Voki now!

MORE ABOUT VOKI…

Now in SW everyone is making little characters that say what ever you want him or her to say. You can also make them look like you and you can record your voice and they will talk exactly the way you do. This interesting website is called voki.com. These cool characters cannot only be human beings but they can be animals and animated creatures in other words, WHAT EVER YOU WANT THEM TO BE! I definitely recommend going on to this website because it something that you will love and it is fun because you get to design your own person. HOW COOL IS THAT? THE COOLEST!

Spanish

In Science we are learning about buildings and how to make them. And this week in Spanish we are drawing a picture of a building that we were assigned to. We need to research facts about it, some of the questions are like, where was the building built? When was it built? And what is the name of your building? Here are some buildings that people researched… The Alhambra Courtyard is in Granada, which is in southern Spain, The Alhambra Gardens are also in Granada, Guell Parc is in Barcelona , The Aqueduct is in Sagova, and the Casa Batllo is also in Barcelona. If you would like to see what they look like, type one of these names in on www.google.com and check it out!

Now click on links below and see some fun Spanish vocabulary!

Spanish Vocabulary                                 More Spanish Vocabulary

The past couple weeks our class 5SW has been doing ping pong in gym It is so cool because you get to play your friends but sometimes people get really competitive. Also some of my peers either play by points or just have fun with it. Every day my friends get better and better, our teacher is the one who made this all possible for us to play ping-pong. Our gym teacher is a really good ping- pong player because he has been playing years of it and every time someone plays him in our class or any class he beats us. We use ping- pong paddles that are really good. Sometimes he makes times in the morning to come in and play our friends in different classes and in our class. Our next sport is jump rope, then baseball and softball, then golf. Today 4-4-08 is the last day of ping- pong and we get to play doubles. Doubles are were you have 4 people playing at once and 2 players on each team, except you play the same exact same thing as the regular game. I think that doubles are more fun than singles.

The suspension bridge is one of the most popular bridges around. There is one connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, and one connecting San Francisco and Marin County. And there are definitely more across the planet. Suspension bridges are made up of…well each bridge in a different place is made up of different things-Brooklyn bridge is made up of two stone piers, and steel wires. The stone piers were constructed with the help of something called a caisson. The cables of the Golden Gate Bridge are made up of thousands of pencil thin wires that are tied to two anchor blocks.

When we tested small bridges in school, we made a suspension bridge out of straws for the poles, books for the posts, fishing line or string for the wires, and tape to hold it all together. To make these bridges we worked in pairs or in a group of three. The highest amount of pennies our suspension bridges held was 298. The lowest amount was 131. All of the different numbers in between were: 283, 200, 179, 176 and 150.

The Arch Bridge has been around since the ancient Romans; well actual they came up with it. On Thursday, instead of building a massive, heavy, stone arch bridge, like the Aqueduct (which the Romans made) we used books and paper to recreate how tension, compression and torsion would affect a bridge. The Arch Bridge held 5 pennies for my group. The other groups got: 7, 7, 7, 11, 3 and 12.

During the lab, we tested two other kinds of bridges and they were a suspension bridge and the post and beam bridge. The post and beam bridge worked the worst and the suspension bridge worked the best. On Friday afternoon we are doing another experiment with truss bridges with some kind of candy, or raw fish, but we are not quit sure exactly what we are doing. We can’t wait!!!

5SW has just started a new social studies unit about Lewis and Clark. There is so much to learn about Lewis and Clark and one of the ways that we are learning about it is by doing a scavenger hunt. We have been asked questions about certain things that are important about Lewis and Clark’s journey and we have to look in books and find the information for the specific questions. We also have a read aloud about Lewis and Clark, called The Captain’s Dog which is written from the perspective of a dog and while we listen to it, if any information comes up, we record it.

In the book Going Along With Lewis & Clark, we learned about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Further into the book we discovered how they communicated and about the languages they learned. One of the facts in the book was about the ages of the members of the Corps and which men were related .For example, the youngest was George Shannon at the age of 19, and the oldest was John Shields age 35. Charles Floyd and Nathaniel were cousins while Ruben and Joseph were brothers. Lewis was 30 and Clark was 34. Along in the book there many side captions.

There is an online game on the 5SW website about when Lewis and Clark go west (see links). It is very exciting for kids that know or like history. In this game you have to read the clues and also you have to answer the questions. The reason why Lewis and Clark went on this expedition is because Thomas Jefferson told Meriwether Lewis to get information of the Northwest Passage and of the west. You had to read several journal entries and facts about the journey. Then you have to take all of what you have just read about and make a decision on a question that the site gives you.

In 5SW reading is very swell. By the end of the year every student must read and document at least one book in each genre. One way that they are documenting their books are storyboards. This is a creative way to share your thinking at really interesting parts. A lot of kids will do one every chapter. Sometimes kids will do journal entries on the book if they couldn’t tell the story with just the storyboard. You see, the storyboards are meant to tell what the part of the book made you think, not just telling what happened in the story. If you finish documenting all of the books that you have to read, you can read any book you want in any genre you want to.

(MUSIC, ART, GYM, SPANISH, LIFE SKILLS)

In Music, we have been very busy learning new songs like Star Wars and perfecting songs that we have already learned. We are also learning Linus and Lucy for fun. Lots of people have been switching instruments and switching from band to chorus.

In Art this week we went on www.mrpicassohead.com and created our own Picasso artwork. We also created winter scenes for the Winter Fest art competition. The work is shown around the school and the winners are hung up in Centennial hall.

During Life Skills we watched our Refusal Skills movies that we filmed. Our next unit will be on puberty.

We have just finished our volleyball unit in gym. We learned to serve, do a “bump” (underhand hit), and we also learned to do an overhand hit. Our next unit will be on ping-pong, and we might also play some DDR (Dance Dance Revolution). In ping-pong some rivals are moving into place.

In Spanish we are learning about famous buildings in España (Spain). Some of our buildings to learn about are the Roman Aqueduct, The Alhambra and the Casa Mila. The Alhambra is a fortress that is so big that only small parts were given to each kid, and about 4 kids have them.

This week students constructed geodesic domes. Click on and read the article below:

Domes

Here are some pictures of the finished products:

This week in class we have been doing fractions, all sorts of fractions. We have done mixed numbers, proper fraction and improper fractions. They are really fun but they are kind of hard to do. We have done a lot of papers on fractions. Sometimes we use pizzas for examples. We are learning how to reduce fractions to make them into more common fractions. We are going to start to add and subtract the fractions with different denominators and we well still use improper fractions and proper fractions.

After completing our study of government, students are still interested in what is going on in government today. Here is one student’s take on the current campaign happenings:

McCain Comes Closer to Nomination;
Obama Wins 10 in a Row

   The presidential race heated up on Wednesday night. McCain won big in Wisconsin that night, picking up 38 plus delegates. People are starting to ask, “Why is Huckabee still in the race?” Shouldn’t he just sit back and patiently wait to be chosen as McCain’s running mate? After all, even if he wins all the upcoming states by 70% to 30%, he won’t get the nomination. So what kind of trick is he playing? In my opinion, he is wasting millions of dollars on his “can’t-paign”. (Yes, I said can’t-paign.) Shouldn’t he quit while he is ahead?

The democratic race is a whole different story. Barrack Obama is carrying on his momentum to ten straight wins, and experts are now asking, is he stoppable? It certainly seems like it is his race to lose. There are 918 delegates left to win in the democratic race. Obama has 1,354 delegates, and Clinton has 1,263. The tell-all March 4th primaries are approaching, and to me it seems that Clinton is becoming increasingly negative, looking for any chink in Obama’s armor.
The biggest and campaign-changing states left to win are Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Clinton will need to win all 3 of those states in order to still be in the race for democratic nominee. Can she do it? McCain seems to be talking like Obama is the democratic nominee already. We’re going to find out very quickly if he is right.