Crunch Time

I am starting to feel the year slip away as we only have 12 days left or as the kids put it 11 1/2.  Hard to believe that they year could be over already.  We will be busy in the next couple weeks as we have an End of theYear reading test to take next week as well as our 3rd Trimester Math test.  Today we took our last unit math test.  We will be going over it tomorrow.  We will be taking would could be our last selection test tomorrow as well. 

Ant Farm Day 14

Ants, Ants, Ants

We did a little experiment this morning as we were reading our ant story.  We added some seeds that they ants eat on one side of the farm and added some cookie crumbs on the other side to see what they liked more.  I think they just like anything to eat. 

The kids wrote some stories about all the different jobs that ants have.  A few students chose to have me share their stories on the blog.

Ant Jobs 

By Anna Atchison

Ants have many different jobs that they have to work together to get done.  Let's start with the queen ant, her job is to lay eggs and the queens goal is to make lots and lots of babies.  Let's go on to the worker ants.  The worker ants have lots of jobs, they pick up food, protect the colony and scoop up dirt to build tunnels.  Let's go on to the scouts.  The scouts look for food and then the scouts call the workers to help them carry all the food back to the nest and to find food is a very dangerous journey.  The ants get very joyful when they find food and the discovery they make when they find food and take it from humans is very cool. The humans are unaware of their food being gone.  When the ants get back to the nest it only takes a few weeks for the food to disappear. 

Ant Jobs

By Lacey Bloom

Ants have many different jobs that they have to work together to get done.  A lot of ants called workers have to build tunnels.  the ant workers have to pick up food and carry it back to their home.  Worker ants also protect their colony so enemies don't get in.  The queen ant lays the eggs and rules the home.  The scout ants find food and show the worker ants.  The ants think that sugar is crystals and carry it back.  The scout ants disappear in the grass to get food the scout ants are unaware of spiders.  The workers scoop up the crystals and take a journey back to their home.  The worker ants have a goal to get food to the queen ant.  The scout ants have a lot of discovery to find food.  The ants will all be joyful. 

Ant Jobs

By Jalyn Thome

Ants have many different jobs that they have to work together to get done.  Since ants have jobs they are unaware of people because they are always working.  When somebody gives the ants food they are joyful and scoop it up to take it to their home or to store ti somewhere.  When they dig their tunnels in an ant farm they are kind of taking a journey around it.  the ants scoop up food and after you look it there it has disappeared and if you give them a ball of sugar then it is a crystal to them.  When they have no tunnels at all on day one and day two it is filled with tunnels that means they are females and they are called workers and it is a discovery to us that a lot changed in one day.  It is the ants goal to keep the queen happy.  Ants have a lot of jobs.  

We finally were able to plant our garden with Mr. McKinney's class.  We plants peas, radishes, kohlrabi, spinach, lettuce, and 2 tomato plants.  It will be interesting to see if any of it comes up before school is out.  I believe some kids and teachers might take care of them this summer so hopefully in the fall we will have some fresh vegetables.

Ant Farm Day 12

I believe this is Day 12 of the ant farm.  In our story today it discussed how ants make rooms that are part of their tunnel system.  The two blue areas are what appear to be rooms that they have created.  One of them actually has a stockpile of food in it. 

Spelling Words

This week we are reading a story that is an animal fantasy about ants.  This story is the one that ties into our ant farm and will allow us to talk about a few different science things.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate this week and we will be able to get our garden planted.  In math this week we will start by reviewing what we have learned the last several weeks and then be taking our Unit 9 test.  

The spelling words for this week are following.

leadership, gracefully, refreshment, uncomfortable, overdoing, remarkable, carefully, unbearably, ownership, unacceptable, impossibly, reappeared, unprepared, oncoming, misbehaving, outrageous, incomprehensible, undoubtedly, independence, disadvantage

Ant Farm Day 9

The ants have been busy and so have we.  This week in reading we are reading a story about a man that keeps a bird as a pet.  Ask your student what the story is all about. 

In math we continued working on multiplication and learned a new method called bow-tie multiplication.  There will be homework over the lattice method which we also worked on today. 

In the middle of all that we squeezed time to go to the middle school and watch a 5th grade band concert with the 4th graders.  We took advantage of the nice afternoon and walked back to school. 

If the ground dries out  yet this week we will be planting our garden box with Mr. McKinney's class. 

If you scroll down and look at yesterday's picture of the ants you can see that they were very busy carrying a lot of sand up to the top.  I am beginning to think that the warm weather gets them energized and moving.  

Ant Farm Day 8

Bridge Building

Today in math we used pieces of paper to build bridges.  We stacked up books and the kids had to build a bridge out of a single piece of paper.  We then had a competition to see whose would hold the most.  Below are some pictures of the bridges. Simon won our competition with his bridge holding 22 miniature erasers.  Isaac was a close 2nd with 21.