End of the Year!

So many fun and exciting things are happening in our classroom these last 2 weeks! Here's what we did last week!

We had a paper airplane competition.  Mrs Flatness ended up being an expert at making paper airplanes and gave us a tutorial.  We learned ways to make them more aerodynamic.  We also learned that it's a skill we can continue to work on at home with scrap paper.

 On another day  we learned how to fold paper to make a paper boat.  None of us were able to follow the exact directions and get it to look like the video's example. But we learned that we all have different ways of learning: some learned by watching the video, others did better hearing me give the directions, and some did better just by getting their hands on the paper and figuring it out.

After we did the paper boats, we got to create a boat from aluminum foil, in any fashion we could figure out. The purpose was to have it hold a LOT of pennies.  Some boats held 20, others held 3 but the champion's boat held 89 pennies before taking on water!  It was interesting to see the different designs: flat bottom, deep cup style, canoe (which did NOT work well), and then those that looked like a shallow dish.

On Thursday we got to celebrate our participation with Fazoli's! All year long we have been reading at home, earning certificates to Fazolis and trying to have the most hours read in the district. We never did win for the "most hours per kid" but we did earn the participation party!  We celebrated with pizza and pasta from Fazoli's.  It was delicious!

Friday we learned about design and construction and physics when we played with mini-marshmallows and toothpicks. We started off hoping to build a tall tower and quickly realized that we needed to focus on team work and design because the towers just wouldn't stay up.  They eventually figured out how to balance the materials to make interesting designs...so that's what we did.

 And lastly, we got to eat s'mores and discuss what we would do if we had s'more time in our classroom. The responses were cute: spend more time with my friends, learn more math, write letters, celebrate.   I forgot to take pics of their responses so I'll edit this post later with those pics.

It's hard to believe it's the end of the year....6.5 school days left! Eeeek!  This upcoming week has something exciting each day (toy day, board games, book swap, PJ/Stuffed animals, field day, etc).  It's quickly coming to an end!