Due to Technical Difficulties... Wednesday/Thursday Posts Combined

Let's begin with a little archived material. On Tuesday after school, students could participate in a workshop with our Spanish teacher for the holiday "Dia de los Muertos." Mrs. O was passing by the cafeteria after the faculty meeting and could not resist getting some pictures of all the fun.
Shout out to all the Bumblebees (and Bumblebee Moms!) who were part of this project. Looked like you were having a great time!
In Language Arts, we are writing biographies. The subject we chose was "Mom". We will write four chapters that we also chose. We will write about her:

1. Childhood

2. Teenage Years

3. Adult Years

4. Now

First, we wrote a topic sentence that will grab the attention of the reader. We called this a "grabber". We had to include Mom's full name, birthdate and birthplace. (Biographies have lots of dates.) We added a line for a "zinger" that told something extremely interesting about our mom!

Moms: you are going to LOVE our finished project!
We finished studying balance in science and we have moved on to a unit on spinners. (We will make tops, zoomers and twirlers!) Today discussed things that are spinning in the world. We guessed the earth, seeds falling from trees, tornadoes and water swirling down a drain (or toilet!). When an object or system moves in a circle around a central axis, it is called "rotational motion" or, in everyday lingo, "spinning".

If a force is applied so that one side of the object moves in one direction and the other side moves in the opposite direction the other direction, the system rotates. Such a force is called torque, and it makes things spin.
Tops are toys that spin. They have a mass, usually in the shape of a disk, attached to a shaft.
After we had spun our tops for a while, we thought of other experiments to try without Mrs. O telling us to!
We tried to draw designs with our "coloring" top.
We timed how long our tops would spin.
We had top wars to see which top would spin longest when bumped by another top. Some of the students made charts to record their data. Way to be scientists, Bumblebees!

Some vocabulary words we will need to know are: air resistance, axis, disk, knot (not the kind in shoelaces!), motion, rotate, shaft, spin, swirl, top, twirl, twist, whirl, wing, zoomer.
And I couldn't resist: Happy Anniversary to my oldest daughter, K and her husband J, on their third anniversary. (I think she was in second grade last week. Hold these kids closely, parents!)