A Whirling, Twirling Day

R came in today and showed us her new manicure: bumblebee and ladybug fingernail polish art!
J and L were turtle wranglers today. JF was the guest photographer of the day.
Look what arrived at school yesterday! Mrs. O is a rule follower, so she did not open it until today: the due date.
It's the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid: "The Ugly Truth". These 5 pre-ordered their book. Today is the release date, so they get their order hot off the presses. (The author will be at Book People in Austin today to sign autographs.)

B brought in a story that she wrote at home for fun. I will share it here:

"Once my Dad was going to a new zoo. It was a drive in zoo. There were no cages to keep the animals away. Monkeys climbed on your car. My dad's car got to the tigers. There was a huge tiger that was sitting on top of a dirt mound. A car in front of them stopped, and you are not allowed to stop! The most huge tiger started running full speed toward the car that stopped. When the tiger got there, he shook the car back and forth. My Dad thought that the car would break!"

Thanks for sharing this, B. I'm always glad when we write for fun at home!
Last week in Science, we studied twirlers in the form of tops. Today we made zoomers with the same disks we used on our tops, but we tied them with string.
We found that there are different ways to start rotational motion (spin).
We can twist one or both hands for a good spin.
We can pull our hands apart to keep the disk spinning.

We can twirl many (or a few) times before pulling the string tight between our hands.

The motion of an object can be changed by pushing or pulling. Tops and zoomers both spin, but in different ways.
Next we moved on to twirlers.
We found that differences in design can change the rotational motion (spin) of spinning objects.
We made three different kinds of twirlers.
We dropped them from different heights and found the higher they are when dropped, the better they spin...Why?
Air resistance can act as the force that initiates (makes) rotational motion (spin). (And how often does your teacher let you stand on a chair for an experiment???)
We tried some of our twirlers out in the butterfly garden.
Standing on things gave us better height.
When we went in, we wrote in our interactive Science journal. We could choose to write about zoomers or twirlers--whichever one interested us the most.
The butterfly garden is beautiful! Please stop by if you haven't lately.

Looking ahead:

• Money/form for Thanksgiving dinner is due on Monday.
• Scholastic book order is due tomorrow.
• Please bring unused Halloween candy to school and the Girl Scouts will get it to charities who can use it.
• The Girl Scouts are also collecting books for a school in Uganda if you have any gently used ones to donate.
• Veteran's Day Assembly Thursday at 9am. You are welcome to come if you can.

We got to use our Document camera/Epson projector today during Science. We watched a short Bill Nye the Science Guy video on balance! We also played interactive games in computer class on balance.