Mining Towns

My kiddos presented their MN Economy presentations. Three did theirs on the mining industry and one did the forestry industry. Two will present on Monday. 

Of the two who presented today, two made brochures. The other two made Minecraft worlds. Man, did those turn out amazing! One 6th grader had an open pit mine and a deep mine. He had railroad tracks in the mine, beams to hold up the ceiling, a building for the supervisors, a stable for the animals that hauled the carts, blacksmith shop and tools, mining carts... I could keep going. The other 6th grader went beyond even that! He had a mining town with a church, a barge to haul the iron/coal away, a lighthouse complete with lighthouse keeper and supplies, a boarding house, a cook house... very impressive. His world was so big, it couldn't load all at once. He's been working on this since the day I introduced the project, which I believe was back in January. You can definitely tell he's been working hard!

My kids have also been working hard to earn pages towards our I Love to Read Month goal of 30,000 pages/minutes read. So far we're up to 17,000. The challenge ends on Monday. A lot of them say they have more pages they haven't turned in, or they're waiting to turn them in until Monday when they have a whole bunch. Quite a few of my class brought books home this weekend with the intention of reading a lot. I hope we can make our goal!!! I have a bunch of books packed in my car that I plan to read while I'm in Fulda this weekend. Hopefully we can pull off a win!

Takin' Care of Business

First day of Junior Achievement with the 7-8th graders. We're going to do one lesson per week while Mr. E teaches my kids PE. It went as well as can be expected; they weren't fans of the new covid-related format. Normally, we'd have a guest presenter come in and teach them for 45min or so. But, this year all the volunteers have to be virtual. The 5-8th graders get to watch videos of the person presenting the information and they get to do the activity on their own. 

I did the first two lessons with the 5-6th graders Monday and Tuesday this week. They weren't fans of the presenter's voice.
"The southern accent is annoying!" one of them said.
"But I do a southern accent in our read-aloud books and that doesn't annoy you," I countered. 
"Can't you just teach us the stuff???" they asked. "We like it better when you do it."
Well, we kept watching the video anyway, but we paused a bunch of times so I could explain it and somehow (shocker shocker), we ended up on a tangent about investing and interest rates.

The 7-8th graders liked their presenter better, but they didn't like how fast he talked. He paused to give them time to respond to some questions or to raise their hands. One of the 7th graders was confused, "Can he see us, Miss H? How does he know we're raising our hands?" 

Their theme for Junior Achievement is "It's My Business" and the task for the first day was to make a business plan, logo, and slogan. Some of these kids do not work well together, so it was a little hairy to figure out groups/solo workers. It ended up being only two girls working together; the rest are by themselves. They came up with neat business ideas: lawn care, something involving sewing, Fun in a Box, 3D printed farm toys (that's an actual business one of the 7th graders is working on doing; he's going to sell them on facebook marketplace), tie dye creations, and tire sales. 

Half Day

All is peaceful and quiet in my classroom this afternoon... the kids got sent home at 11:30 again today for our second half day of the month. 

After I wrap up at school, I'll be working at the ReStore to earn more hours towards my sweat equity on my Habitat house. My USDA loan has been submitted, and now we wait to hear how much they'll approve for me. Then work can begin on designing my house!

Our day at school was pretty slow. We did two Daily 5 rounds this morning before chapel and I met with my Wednesday students to talk about their books. Chapel was at church; it was windy on the way there and back. We practiced a song we'll record to show at a future Lenten service. The rest of the morning was spent reading aloud our latest book War Stories by Gordon Korman. My class is making so many connections to this book. A lot of our grandparents have served in the military and because there are lots of other war books and movies out there, most of my kids are familiar with some of the WWII technology. 

Today's chapters took place on Omaha Beach/Normandy for the D-Day invasion. The author's descriptions of the battle really struck home and made us think about how terrible war really is. It made me think about all our soldiers, still off fighting wars or preparing to fight future wars. It reminds me I should pray for our military more often...

Filming

The 5-6th graders have been focusing on playing Holy Holy Holy on the tone chimes and today was filming day. The video will play at tomorrow night's Lenten service. It took a little extra time for set-up because the camera had to be positioned 'just so' to get all my students in frame. 

First, I tried using my iPod, but the sound quality was very shaky and tinny. Then, I tried the class iPad. It zoomed way in on them and I couldn't back it up, so I was going to make them shuffle their desks around so the camera would see them all. But my kids said we should play the song through once as a sound test, just in case the sound wasn't better; then they wouldn't have to reshuffle their desks. Aren't they smart?

I'm glad we did, because the sound was much better quality and the frame widened out when I played the video back. So they didn't have to move again after all! The video turned out great, with just a few oopses. I sent it off to our AV coordinator and she'll add it to the church screens for tomorrow!

Since filming cut into their recess time (and it's so nice today... 40s!), we stayed outside longer than our normal time. The kindergarteners wanted the side we were on when they came out for their normal recess, so we swapped sides and moved to the big hill. 

We ended up skipping science/social studies today. One of the 5th graders said, "Besides, being outside is like science time!"
"Howso?"
"Well, snow is made of molecules, and when you put the molecules together, you get bigger snow molecules and those make piles of ice and snow!" 

Corner

The kids were very exuberant today, and I was... less so. I stayed up late correcting my papers and getting midterms finished. Youth group went tubing yesterday afternoon, which was fun, but sucked away my afternoon. 

We started our new physics science book today. The kids tried to convince me we should do social studies all week since our big project is due Friday. Ha. No. Good try. 

Joe was scritch scratching this afternoon, so we let him wander the room while we played tone chimes. We left him out while we were at recess, and one of the 5th graders build a 'cage' for him in the lab area so he wouldn't escape while we were gone. He escaped. The cage was a few stools he could crawl between so it wasn't very secure. Thankfully, I shut the door behind us, so he didn't even have a chance of leaving the room. 

He's now happily eating his lettuce and seems a bit calmer after his walk. Hopefully my kids will be calmer tomorrow! Half of them forgot their snow gear even though last week I told them we'd be going outside for every recess. It's pretty sloppy/melty out, so we had both recesses in the gym so they wouldn't be soaked for the bus ride home. 

Finally Friday

Boy, for a short week, this week seemed long! 

Today was a catchup day. It's midterms, which means we only have one and a half quarters left of the school year. Wow. Hard to believe. It's been basically a year since the whole corona virus thing started. Also hard to believe. 

My kids turned in everything they needed to today! Instead of playing an English game, I gave them time to memorize their memory work, finish their Invention report, or play games if they had finished everything else. 

For science this afternoon, instead of discussing a random topic they want to learn about, we had a bit of extra recess, followed by calculating the mining company grand totals from yesterday (boys won), followed by the wrapping up of our chemistry book. Next week we start physics!

The best surprise of the day was not exactly a surprise. I had told my 5-6th graders we'd do tone chimes when I came back from class with the 7-8th graders. They should get everything set up and pick a song to start with. If they wanted, they could try directing themselves. So, I walked through the door to find them playing the song we're going to film for church next week. They'd already played it a few times and were each taking turns counting the measures. What a great group of kids I have! 

Birdseed Mining

Our social studies lab turned out interesting today... in the vein of the mining economy in Minnesota, our lab involved the students 'mining' from a pie plate full of grains/seeds/minirocks/beads with a tweezers. 

I separated them into two mining companies, boys vs. girls. Each had a wagon (cup) to put their ore and I didn't tell them what each thing was worth until after their mining day had ended (10min). The girls got a $10 fine for being messy while mining. The boys tried to strategize by focusing on a particular kind of item: rice, popcorn kernels, noodles, rocks, or searching for beads. They did a lot more sifting and picking through their tray instead of going for volume like the girls did. 

The beads are the valuable metals like gold, silver, and copper. The tricky bit is that there are two white beads that mean they have to pay $100 for reclamation purposes. So if their strategy is to just find all the beads, they'll end up losing money. The other thing they're supposed to see is that iron (noodles) will net them the most cash even though it has the lowest value, showing that quantity over quality in mining is profitable.

After time was up, they had to calculate their earnings. They struggled with that a lot more than I thought they would... most of it was easy multiplication by 10 or 100. Somehow their calculators messed it up. We ran out of time at the end of the day, so we'll do our official totals tomorrow. First glance looks like maybe the boys pulled out a win. We'll need to double check the math. 

Whiteout

The end of the polar vortex is in sight! Light fluffy snow drifted down pretty much all day, which my earth science students could tell you means a different kind of air front is moving in. 

My 5-6th graders tried to convince me it was bad enough outside we should call school off for the rest of the day. "Miss H! It's a total whiteout out there!" One of them held a small piece of white paper over the window. "See?"

My response was not what he hoped for, so he tried again, this time pulling down the white window shades on all the windows. "Look! You can't see anything out there! We better go home."

"Eh, if we can't see anything, it's too dangerous for you to go home! We better just stay at school. We'll have a sleepover."

They weren't enthused about that idea either. 

Really, it only snowed a half an inch. Some nice gentleman student scraped a path from my classroom porch to my car door. I saw that he also made a path to Mr. and Mrs. E's house and from the door to the other teachers' cars. Such a thoughtful guy!

PS- We finally did our science lab of extracting DNA from strawberries. It's way easier than it sounds. The rubbing alcohol has to be super cold to make it work the best, and because I left it outside last night after school, it was and the lab worked perfectly! Each group got a good amount of stringy, white DNA. One girl had the bright idea to examine it under a microscope, so we prepared a few slides and got to take a look! Awesome!

Because I wanted to have enough time for the lab, we swapped English and science time. The lab wrapped up before lunch and English was at the end of the day. Teaching English isn't my favorite subject, and I like to end the day teaching something I'm excited about, so that was a bit of a let down, but my students were very productive! They also couldn't convince me to read-aloud extra and skip the lesson. 😏

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

One of the 5th graders came up to my desk at the end of the day with a bag in her hand.
"Miss H, my grandma from Arizona wanted me to give this to you. It's cotton bolls."
I oohed and ahhed appropriately, then she handed me another bag, a little slimier...
"And this is an... olive branch from their tree and I think a piece of real aloe vera from her garden."
As I peered into the bag she added, "Yeah, I should've given it to you a while ago, but I forgot." 

The aloe had turned brown and squishy and a few of the olives had a lovely patch of mold starting. Still, pretty neat. After school I picked some seeds out of the cotton boll to plant (apparently they're easy to grow, especially if you can keep them above 60 degrees F). 

I'm also going to try growing the olive seeds. Those are a bit trickier. From my research, they take 40 days to germinate. Plus you have to nick the end before soaking them in water to give them a head start. I tried trimming the end off with a pliers, but ended up shattering the seed. The seed coat is quite thick. I'm not sure if I'll try that with the rest of the seeds. I decided to let them dry out overnight to see if that helps it cut easier.

Now I just need to brave the cold shed to grab some pots and potting soil... Sounds like the polar vortex will be breaking this weekend! Then next week we'll be in the 30s-40s! Hooray!

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is a Sunday this year, and with no school on Monday for Presidents' Day, we celebrated today. I kind of forgot about having a party... but my kids remembered to bring in treats regardless. I've noticed the trend is to give each other candy and skip the cards. One of my students gave me a HUGE heart-shaped Russel Stover box. My mouth watered until I picked it up and realized it was not heavy enough for chocolate. Opening the box revealed a tissue-paper wrapped package; he'd given me a scarf with little hearts all over it. Aww! That's just as good as chocolate. Mrs. L said the same thing happened to her! (A younger brother is in her class).

My kids were on the prowl for tokens today. They remembered the gigantic 'diamonds' I have worth 50 tokens. By the end of the day, all three diamonds were claimed. Two kids sorted all the picture books alphabetically and reshelved them. Another did dishes from last week's lab. A few put chapter books back on the shelves and two tidied up the tables and reorganized the games and resource areas of the classroom. 

We finally got our church year chain rehung. Normally we do that at the beginning of school, but with covid I wasn't sure how to manage it without having kids too close to each other. Now, the start of covid was about a year ago, and our leftover chain from last year matches that. Two kids counted colors and links and figured out how many we needed to add to make last year's chain fit this year. The ceiling looks a lot more colorful now!

Asthma

I have two kids with asthma in my class. I've had a kid here and there other years, but these two are a bit more hesitant to take their inhaler before recess/PE (or have a worse case). 

Earlier this week one of them played too hard during hockey (without taking an inhaler prior to recess) and had really hurting ribs and lungs for a while. That incident wasn't too bad. I had to keep telling the kid to keep his mask down! He kept pulling it up even after I said, "You need to be able to breathe, keep it down! It's for a medical issue so you don't have to keep it up!"

Today, Mr. E and I swapped classes for PE again. Instead of dance, the 7-8th graders just played tone chimes the whole time. Mr. E ran my class hard (both kids took their inhalers), but the other one wouldn't ask for breaks when she needed them. After we switched back, she said she didn't feel so well. Then she said she was light-headed. She drank some water and tried to keep her arms elevated to let more air in her lungs. 

So we started science class. About ten minutes in, she didn't look much better. My class is small and would hear anything I said to her if I went by her desk to check-in, but I didn't want to call her out in front of everyone, so I walked over anyway. She was crying and said she couldn't catch her breath. So I had her straddle a chair and put her arms on the back to open up her ribcage more. I made her pull her mask down. (These kids and their masks during non-necessary times!!!) 

It's been a while since I've had asthma training, so of course now I remember all the things I should've said/done. It's not much more than I did, but I could've reminded her to stay calm and breathe slowly. I think she was getting in her head too much and couldn't calm down. She ended up going home about 20min early. When we did highs and lows, her asthma attack was everyone's low, mine included. :/ Not a great end to the day.

On a more positive note, after she went home and we got back on track with science, the 5-6th graders and I took a foray into life science again... our topic was on biological polymers, which led to cells, which led to the cell membrane, which led to how viruses get in our cells, which led to how our body fights off germs, which led to a clip from the Magic School Bus episode where they go inside a classmate's body to see what's making him sick... which led to the lymphatic system, which took us to the end of the day. Whew!

Pencils

This morning was a bit unusual. Wednesdays during covid are a bit unusual to begin with since we don't have chapel right away. I have a student who comes at 9:05 because she does violin lessons before school, so I don't want to do anything too important and have her miss. Lately, we've just been having extra read-to-self time, or do a round or two of Daily 5. Today, all the 6th graders and the remaining 5th grader were stuck on math. 

They wanted help from Mr. E before school, and word on the street was he'd help them in the office, so I sent them down there to wait. That left an empty, peaceful classroom. I got a bunch of correcting done! They ended up coming back at 8:45, which I was fine with since they were just going to be reading anyway. 

Later they told me one of the 7th graders had come into the office and froze at the sight of all of my students sitting around the table. 

"What are you doing?" 

I think they told her they were waiting for Mr. E. 

She replied, "Are you in trouble? What'd you guys do?"

One of the 6th grade boys said, "We were throwing pencils at Miss H."

"Well, that was stupid." She bought it, hook, line, and sinker. But not for long. The 5th grader broke first and then she knew they were joking.

Limbo

Mr. E and I switched classes for PE again. He did floor hockey with my class and I did dance with his. The 7-8th graders are fast learners! They remembered everything I taught them last time with just a little refresher. We learned Cotton Eyed Joe this time and tried the limbo. There is one 8th grader who is in dance and can do the splits. She did super well at the limbo. The boys did an impressive job too! 

Once the bar got too low, they tried jumping over it. They were surprisingly good at that too. One boy (he's shorter) couldn't jump that high, so he dragged a chair over, stood on the chair, and then jumped over. Clever. 

I've taught them all the dances I did with the 5-6th graders, so I need to figure out what we'll do on Thursday for PE. Maybe we'll do music instead and play tone chimes...

Stroke of Genius and Disappointments

There were little packages of cookies on the table in the office up for grabs, so after lunch I snagged one hoping to bite into a delicious chocolate chip cookie... nope. Oatmeal raisin. Bummer.

We had some super secret surprise virtual visitors for lunch today, two girls who are being homeschooled this year because of the pandemic. Their daycare lady messaged me over the weekend to see if they could join our class to have some social time with their old classmates. So I set up the video screens so they could see everyone and everyone could see them. They couldn't get the link to work at first, so the suspense was nail-biting! 

I didn't tell my students about it (actually I forgot all about it until one of my kids asked a question about the homeschool kids... thanks Lord for the reminder!), but they were super excited to guess who our special guests were! Their first guess was our marine pen pal. Actually, we're going to skype with him in a few weeks once he gets back from the range. My kiddos never ended up guessing who our visitors were. 

My stroke of genius today happened in science class. We're on the last chapter of our chemistry book, and the lab is one I always skip because it grosses kids out too much. That's right. It's too gross for 5-6th graders. It involves spitting into a cup and holding bread in your mouth for a minute, which apparently makes kids gag. I only tried the lab twice before giving up. The last chapter is on biological polymers (proteins), and while we learned the information today, my kids focused in on DNA. Hey, that's a polymer too. Hey, I have a lab that involves DNA extraction. Hey, these kids like looking at cool stuff and they listen really well, they could probably handle this lab. Hey, it's super cold outside so we'd be able to get the ethyl alcohol super chilled and have better results. Hey class, let's do a lab this week after all! 

One girl has old strawberries at home she's going to donate to the cause, otherwise I have everything else we need!

68 degrees

Another rousing game of the Adjective Game today. It amazes me how into it these kids get. 

Huggable, kissable, lovable, breakable, catchable all made an appearance again, along with weird and tearable. The two items we were describing were a laptop and a sticky tab (a translucent, sticky bookmark that is movable, portable, and cyan). 

They wanted to do two rounds, but we only had time for a round and a half before lunch, so we saved their second list of words to read at the end of the day. While they were doing the challenge in the morning, one of the boys asked me what temperature it was in our classroom. 68 degrees. I didn't think anything of it until they read aloud their words, "room temperature..." Okay, technically the object is room temperature. "...68 degrees..." Yes, I suppose that would be another way to describe it. The girls were not pleased about that one, but really, it's true! You gotta give them points for creativity. 

The boys' team won by one point 30 to 29. Everyone agreed we need to make different teams for next time. Each team has their own strategy for winning and they want to shake things up!

Snow Day!

We had a snow day today! I thought it would be two hours late, but nope, New Ulm called school off at 6am. I caught up on some sleep, messaged parents back, lesson planned, read a book, did dishes and cleaned a bit, baked bread, and went to the virtual staff meeting. Full day!

Slime

Our poor slime mold is either dead or going into hibernation. Two boys with nothing to do took the moldy petri dishes outside to see if they could clean them off, but it got rid of the slime mold too. Both Helga and Luna are hanging in there, so I stuck a piece of paper towel in there to see if we can get them to revert back to the sclerotia mode. The original slime has gone into hibernation, but not on a towel, so I'm debating putting it into a new petri dish to see if I can restart it. 

The 5-6th graders worked with slime today too! Their lab involved mixing various polymers together to see how the characteristics of each thing change. Basically, we made slime. It's a simple lab mixing liquid glue and liquid starch (corn starch, water, borax). Different colors of glue have different results, which is supposed to show them that the glues are made of different polymers. We didn't get that far today. Tomorrow we'll go over our results and draw conclusions!

Wildfires

Today was the first day of 5-6th PE with Mr. E and 7-8 dance with Miss H. Dance went pretty well with their class. They were super chatty today and two of the seven didn't want to participate (one boy and one girl), so that was the hardest part. We covered a lot of dances! Cha cha slide, cupid shuffle, macarena, salsa, cha cha, electric slide, and random dance moves. My 5-6th graders were impressed we covered so many dances (and that most of the class had fun), but then one of my 6th graders pointed out PE was a half an hour this time instead of the usual 20min. It was less impressive after that!

Mr. E ran the 5-6th graders so much, partly because they wanted a tough practice and partly to show them what it would be like if we had basketball practice with masks on. I got back to the classroom and found all of them sitting on the floor, pooped. They asked if they could open the outside door to get more cool air in. Nope. How about sit on the floor during MN history? Sure. So they did. 

We had a great class. We finally finished learning about the forestry industry in Minnesota and moved on to the mining industry. A lot of them are doing their projects on mining, so they've been itching to talk about it and see pictures. At lunch I worried I didn't have enough pictures of mining towns to satisfy them, and in my search for pictures, I stumbled on a slide show about MN mining. I learned a bunch of stuff and put some of the facts/photos in my powerpoint. Did you know the largest open pit mine in the world is in MN? 

Forest fires were also discussed. Two boys made connections to the California and Colorado wildfires from last year, so we did research to see how many acres were effected. Answer: total land from all the CA fires is over 4 million acres, Colorado is about a half a million. We also found a map of the wildfires going on right now in the US (and the world). Super neat.

Fluffy Snow

 As nice as it was to have Friday off, it was good to be back. However, my morning started a little frantically... I reset my alarm for its usual time of 5:50, except I actually set it for 6:50 and woke up at 7am! Oops! So I scurried around and still made it to school by 7:35. Not bad. The frantic energy carried on until school started though.

My kids had lots to catch me up on from their day Friday. The big question was if they had finished reading John Blair and the Great Hinkley Fire, a book about the real-life fire in Hinkley, MN back in 1894. It ties in really well with our current topic in MN history. Turns out, they only read half of it. We were going to finish it today during reading, but somehow they convinced me to read more of our read-aloud book instead. "We didn't get to read it Friday! We'll do double English tomorrow! We'll..." 

We still did English, but I made them a deal for 10 more minutes of reading if they would work on their Invention reports during their work on writing round instead of games. They thought about giving up a read to self round, but today is the first day of February so it's "I Love to Read" month and they want to read all the pages they can. 

Noon recess we were in the gym. Most of the class played pass the volleyball, but one kid stalwartly built a tower out of plastic interlocking blocks. Last Thursday he tried to use all the blocks to make a tower that reached the basketball hoop, but he wasn't tall enough. Instead of giving up, he kept trying different things. Recess ended before he got it. He said he didn't get it on Friday either. He got it today though! Once the tower was made, he and the other 5th grader shot baskets and watched the ball go down through the block tunnel. At the bottom, they peeled one block back to make a door to get the ball out. I was so proud of them for problem solving and making it work!

Afternoon recess was outside. The snow was so fluffy they didn't want to sled (they said it was no fun in fluff). Instead they ran around in it, made snow angels, and buried each other. Crazy kids! But they're my kids and I love 'em.