Click here to read about and watch a video about last year’s coast trip! Here’s the permission slip (with detailed info) and here’s the tentative itinerary.
Coast Trip Preview
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Category Archives: Special Events
Chaperones Urgently Needed!
Our return trip to Crater Lake is scheduled for Monday, April 7th. If you recall, the kids visited the National Park in the fall and learned about volcanoes, the lake’s history, and the native species. The spring trip, meanwhile, includes a snow shoe hike, some sledding, and information about how weather impacts the habitat there. This is another great trip for our students, but we need parents to join us. If you’re able, please let me know as soon as possible.
Also, keep in mind other upcoming trips including Table Rock on May 16th and our Oregon Coast Excursion on May 29th and 30th.
In class this week students will be starting yet another set of Book Clubs, starting their DARE essays (for real this time), and with any luck, finishing their Classroom Constitution. We’ll also be jumping into algebraic expressions. Sound scary? It’s not as bad as it sounds. Here’s the homework for this week: Monday, March 31st; Tuesday, April 1st; Wednesday, April 2nd; Thursday, April 3rd; Friday, April 4th.
Finally, congrats to #BeastMode for making it to the championship game of CPE’s 1st Annual Sportsmanship Floor Hockey Tourney, and to my class as a whole for demonstrating good sportsmanship throughout the event. You kids deserve a corn dog!
Year-End Baby Picture Show
It’s time to send in those baby pictures for our annual Year-in-Review and 5th Grade Baby Picture Program. Select a photo of your 5th grader from when he or she was an infant (between 9 months and 3 years are most popular; close ups with vibrant colors work best). Use a sticky note to put the child’s first and last name on the back. Drop it by the school or have your child deliver it to Mr. Lewis. We’ll be making digital scans of each photo and then returning them on the day of the show in June. If you’d prefer, you can scan the photo yourself and simply e-mail it to mack.lewis@district6.org. We’d like to have all photos in by Spring Break at the end of March. For more info click here, but if you have any questions, e-mail Mr. Lewis at mack.lewis@district6.org.
Adopt-a-Street Clean-up
Room 15 kids headed out to give Hopkins Street a bit of a shine on Friday. By the time they returned to class, they’d collected more than thirty-three pounds of litter! A hearty thanks to Mrs. Ball and Mr. Hackwell for joining us as chaperones. Without their help we would not have been able to fulfill our agreement with the City of Central Point. To see pictures from the clean-up, click on the photo at left (all photos taken by Kalli!).
Field Trip Dates
Although we’ve already taken a slew of field trips this year, we have a passel of them yet to come. In case you have aspirations of joining us, here are the dates: We’ll be joining Mr. Kuhlman’s class for a trip to ScienceWorks in Ashland on Friday, Dec. 20th. All 4th and 5th grade classes will be heading to rural Josephine County for the 23rd annual Tree Plant on Friday, Feb. 9th. The 5th grade Outdoor Education trip to the Oregon Coast, our big overnight excursion, is set for May 29th and 30th. We also have two or three more Adopt-a-Street walking field trips, DARE Day, and a return trip t Crater Lake National Park, but those dates aren’t yet set. Of course, we need volunteers to join us on all of them. Make sure you’ve turned in your background check paperwork, and then let us know if you’d like to help out.
Play Performances
The kids performed their explorer plays last week. Lewis & Clark and Birdgirl appears below, and to see Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth and Fly Me to the Moon (Apollo 11), just click on the title!
2013 Sams Valley Mini-Marathon
The 39th running of the Sams Valley Mini-Marathon took place on Halloween. Room 15’s own Logan B. took home the boys championship trophy with a time of 20 minutes and 51 seconds. Other top finishers from CPE included Tyson P. (5th), Lucas K, (9th), and Ellie L. (4th Girls). Other Room 15 kids with strong performances included Lizzy H., Kalli B., and Samantha P., as well as Hunter C., Tucker F., and Tyler B. (Great job kids!) Over 600 runners participated. Read Buffy Pollack’s coverage of the Marathon at mailtribune.com. You can also check out some great photos here.
Forty-nine Pounds of Litter
Room 15 kids collected 49 pounds of litter during our first Adopt-a-Street clean-up of this school year. Students competed in table-group teams to see which group could collect the most trash. The Flaming Dingos and the Nerdy Monkeys each scored 17.5 pounds. The Adopt-a-Street Clean-up is a community service activity through the City of Central Point. It’s also a lesson in street safety and, because we estimate and weigh our trash bags, a “real world” math lesson. Special thanks to Mrs. Shook and Grandpa Dwayne for serving as chaperones! For more pics and for information about past clean-ups, follow the Adopt-a-Street link at right.
5th Grade Coastal Adventure
Despite rainy weather, a hard gym floor, and sometimes ill-prepared campers, our 5th Grade Coastal Adventure was a mega-hit with kids, parents, and teachers alike. Our first major stop was at the South Slough Estuary near Charleston. Here the kids hiked down the Hidden Creek Trail to activity stations where they learned about pickleweed, migrating birds, estuary soup, and uplands wildlife. Next, we pulled in at Sunset Bay State Park where rain and surf combined to soak the majority of our students. Fortunately we had rented the gazebo. Kids crowded around picnic tables covered with hotdogs, potato salad, chips, cookies, and soda, then gathered around the campfire to roast marshmallows and to keep warm. Once we’d rescued all the lost shoes, jackets, and frisbees from the beach, we headed to North Bend High School. After setting up our bunks, we then walked to the aquatic center down the street for a vigorous swim and a few Tarzan escapades on the rope swing. What followed was a rough night on the gym floor under lights that couldn’t be fully dimmed, but the kids awoke in good spirits and headed off to breakfast at Cape Arago. We then descended on the tide pools, applying what we’d learned from our research projects to a series of short videos (see below). We concluded our day with brief stops at the Simpson Reef Viewpoint where we watched harbor seals and sea lions through telescopes, and at the Charleston Marina where we checked out the fishing vessels. You can see pictures from our trip by clicking here.
Special thanks to all the amazing parents who assisted with the trip: Mrs. Odom, Mrs. Hawkins, Mrs. Collom, Mrs. Westbrock, Mr. Herbst, Mr. Gerhard, Mrs. Hamre, Mrs. Gregg, Mrs. Acrey, Ms. Coy, Mrs. Colbert, Mrs. Reed, Mrs. Medina, Mrs. Bass, and Mr. and Mrs. Spencer.
The three-day weekend gave us all a chance to catch our breath before heading back to class on Tuesday. The big events this week include Scenic Orientation on Tuesday and DARE Day on Wednesday. In the meantime, here’s our math homework for the week: Tuesday, May 28; Wednesday, May 29; Thursday, May 30.
Upcoming Coast Trip and More
Room 15 kids picked up 23 pounds of trash on our third Adopt-A-Street Clean-up. This is significantly less than previous outings, but it wasn’t due to any lack of effort on the kids’ part. Our theory is that Hopkins Street residents are doing a better job of cleaning up after themselves. The photo at left is my favorite from the clean-up. It was taken during our brief respite at Van Horn Park.
So much to do and so little time to do it! Our 5th Grade Oregon Coast Adventure is just around the corner–May 23rd and 24th, to be exact. We’ll be spending the next three weeks preparing for it with classroom activities related to trip. In the meantime, a packet of information including the permission slip, itinerary, and chaperone form will be going home with students this week. Of course, we still have all the rest of our classwork to address. Students will be finishing up their current Book Clubs by early next week, they have new vocabulary words on Monday, April 29th, and in math we’ll be wrapping up our study of graphs with a quiz this Friday. Here’s the homework for this week: Monday, April 29th; Tuesday, April 30th; Wednesday, May 1st; Thursday, May 2nd.
Finally, students performed their classroom plays last week. These are simple but fun classroom productions that, according to research on the brain, improve fluency quite significantly. Click here to see The Stupids, and here to see Babe. Horton Hears a Who appears right here: