Watch out - Here comes Peter!

Ski Trip!

Today was SO fun. It was filled with wipeouts AND snackouts. This morning, our hearts were beating fast and our minds were racing thinking about what would happen. We thought we'd fall, but Brandon only fell twice. The all slope pass was lots of fun because the hills were so big. One slope was really steep, and Sebastian says "When I went down, I felt like I was going to explode because I was going like 40 mph, but I didn't fall!" Tiffany decided she doesn't like skiing, because she doesn't want to fall. She only fell twice, but she didn't get that wet. Instead, she turned in her skis after the lessons and walked around talking and playing WAR (a card game). There was tons of candy and we liked slipping Sour Skittles in people's drinks. On the chair lift one girl started crying because she was scared. Denis fell because the nose of his skis dug into the snow. Mango had a BLAST. There were lots of hilarious crashes; some of them were just a chain of events. Monica took like 20 minutes to get up the bunny slope just to fall and slide all the way down. Dillon fell and just sat there, and when we yelled to him, he just sat up and didn't move. It was HARD to get up, though.

Language Arts
Most students have
already completed or
are about to complete the final drafts of their research paper. We’re currently in the middle of creating Book Commercials, which will be videotaped for premier on Reading Night, March 5th. (Be there or be square!) Heads up: Reading groups will change as of next Monday, based on recent performance.

Congrats, Harper!!We are SO proud of how Harper represented us at the Spelling Bee recently. Way to go – you made us look GOOD!

Science Students have completed their terrarium/aquarium set up and are moving on to study how pollution affects the environment and their eco-column. The counselor visits with us every other Wednesday. She is working with us on topic such as self esteem and transferring to Junior high.

S.S.
· Just wrapping up our quickie study of Mesoamerica (also known as the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs).
· Test over Ch. 6 sometime next week, most likely Wednesday. If you’ve been keeping up with your work and paying attention in class, this shouldn’t be too tough.GUESS WHAT…it’s on to GREECE next!! This is going to be interesting – one major important culture. (Ch. 9)

Math The state math assessment is coming up sooner than we’d like [March 10, 11, and 12], and when I say “we”, I mean kids AND teachers! We’ve doubled up on math lessons three times now just to make sure we cover all the bases before the test, so we’re hoping to show everyone in Lawrence just how brilliant our kiddos are. Right now we’re working with probability and soon we’ll cover tree diagrams, then coordinate planes.

Today was Valentines Day. Me and my class had a lot of snacks, and had a lot of fun. We had this one cake that was huge and was covered in frosting and strawberries. It was very good. We had a lot of other food from people in my class. Killian brought a cookie cake. We also had cookies, cakes, cupcakes, and pop. We passed out Valentine cards. Some even passed out goodie bags. Everone had a lot of fun.
by: Imelda and Dakota

Social Studies Today

Today in S.S. we learned how to write our names using a Mayan Heiroglyphic syllabary. We learned that the Mayans wrote in syllables instead of letters and that certain syllables had to be written as another syllable instead.

2-11-09

Today Dillon and Hamza "cleaned" the fish tanks.

Learning Chinese

Randi Hacker, from KU, came to teach some things about speaking Chinese. It is a language where your TONE is important. We learned how to count and tell how old we are. We also figured out how to read some of the characters. Did you know that there are THOUSANDS of characters in Chinese? That's a lot more than the twenty-six in English!