A tradition in third grade is to make gingerbread houses. Thought it would be fun to make a video about the tradition.

Teachers and students in PreK through Grade 6 participated in the Holiday Card Exchange Project hosted by Projects by Jen. Each class was teamed up with 29 other classrooms throughout the United States and Canada to exchange cards. In the 2nd/3rd grade hallway, a map was hung to indicate where the cards had come from. Each card came with information about the school’s location, grade level, the number of boys vs girls, interesting facts about each classroom, and some included digital links.

Greg Tang’s math website is a wonderful FREE website for students to work on math strategies and skills. Until January 8, 2014, the site is holding a math challenge for Kindergarten – 5th grade students. Using Greg Tang’s online games, the students need to complete a grade-level game board. A fun way to work on math skills! An example of the second grade game board is shown below:

To find out more about the challenge, visit Greg Tang’s Winter Break Math Challenge.

This week was Computer Science Education Week (December 9-15) and to celebrate schools were encouraged to do an Hour of Code. Grades 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 participated in this event. Grades 2, 3 and 5 learned how to code using the website Tynker.com and successfully taught either a dog or an astronaut to move through various tasks. Grade 6 learned how to program their NXT robots to speak and dance.

You can read more about this event and find links to free programming tutorials at Code.org or view a video about the event.

As of today, 11,184,720 students have done the Hour of Code and written 358,694,111 lines of code!

As part of their fifth grade curriculum, the students learn about the world’s continents – location, size, people, natural and man-made landforms, climate, countries, famous places, and natural resources. This fall Mr. Stewart’s students were challenged by “Information Design Systems” (IDS) to work in teams to research and create a website for upper elementary students on a specific continent. As part of the design work, the students developed a continent template in which future classes would continue to research the specific continent and extend their research into countries within each continent.

Students were responsible for researching and presenting their information in a format that was visually striking, attention grabbing, age-appropriate (grades 4-6), factually accurate and easy to navigate. Each group was expected to create a home page, map page, people page, landforms page, and resources/climate page. They also created a countries page which future students will use to continue the research.

On November 25, four field representatives from “Information Design Systems” and Anne Ross, test school principal, came to hear each group present their website. After the presentations, the five representatives provided the students with positive feedback and suggestions on how to improve their websites. On December 5th, the students were notified that their revised websites had been accepted by IDS!

To view each website, click on the images below: