Category Archives: 5th Grade

Capstone blog post #3

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Capstone is finally over, and I think that I did a good job on my considering the circumstances. I choose to do my capstone in the form of a ted talk. I chose this because I had never done a ted talk before and I thought it might be fun, it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. My favorite part of capstone was putting together the slide show and choosing the pictures, I put a lot of work into making it look good and go with what I was saying. In the end I wound up getting rid of a lot of pictures and changing a lot of things. I had a lot of trouble finding the pictures I needed so I wound up having to take a few pictures from books. Another challenge that I faced was with the script and revising. I love to write but this was really hard, especially since I wasn’t in school. I am really nervous about sharing my project. Now looking back I would have done a different topic, but now I have ideas for any future projects.

Capstone blog post #2

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For my capstone I interviewed Allen Just, he works in Environmental Medicine & Public Health at Mount. Sinai. He was able to answer all of the questions I had for him about my topic. I interviewed him because I knew that he would probably be able to answer most of my questions. It was actually easier than I thought to get an interview because he was my old neighbor. So I was able to just call him and ask the questions. A challenge that I had with the interview was coming up with questions. I was having trouble coming up with questions that would be really really helpful, otherwise i wouldn’t be able to use some of the answers to help me with my Capstone project. The most helpful thing that I learned from this interview is that there are a lot of books on this topic so that was helpful to my research.

Here is a picture of the person I interviewed:

Capstone Blog Post #1

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My class and I just started capstone! I am so excited! Capstone is a project that the fifth graders do at the end of the year. My project is going to be about plant based eating. The main question That I am researching is “what are the positive impacts of plant based eating” and my sub questions are 

  • “ What is a plant based diet and what does it look like on a regular bases,” 
  • “What impact does plant based eating have on the environment,” 
  • “What are the economic benefits of a plant-based eating?”
  • “what are the impacts of a plant based diet on the human body” 
  • “What are the difficulties of eating plant based?” 

already knowing a little bit about my topic was really helpful with picking my main inquiry question. That made it so that I chose a question that nobody had the answer to yet. One of the challenging things about choosing a main question to research is choosing just one. There were tons of things I could have researched with my topic but eventually I narrowed it down to what are the positive impacts of plant based eating. 

 

As a learner I know that I usually learn best when I read or listen to things more than once, project based learning or if I can experience what I am learning about that’s why I decided to become a weekday vegetarian for this project. That means that I am a vegetarian but only during the week on the weekends I can eat meat. I thought this was a good choice because I can’t go out to the store all the time and get ingredients for vegetarian dishes due to the coronavirus pandemic so this was a good compromise. I can’t wait to work on this project some more!

Fire?

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On September, Friday the 13th it was a perfectly normal day at Heathcote Elementary School in Scarsdale New York. Kids were waiting in the halls for the bell to ring then they heard it. It wasn’t the bell it was the fire alarm.

 

A 5 grader here at Heathcote  Morgan Greco says “ When I got to school I saw the teachers and students flooding out of the school I thought it was an assembly or something but then I heard the ringing and saw the flashing lights.”

 

The cause is still unknown. Some students think that someone must have pulled the fire alarm while others think that since it was Friday the 13th it was just bad luck. But some students don’t think it was any of those things 5th grader, Kaitlyn Shadroff thinks “ It must have been smoke coming from the kitchen or something, I don’t think it was bad luck or a student’s fault.”

 

Many students thought that there actually was a fire in the school, 5th grader, Sara Mayer says “ I wasn’t really sure but the expressions on the teacher’s faces shoed this wasn’t planned”

 

Well, this was one strange event here at Heathcote elementary school ( in Scarsdale N.Y) that left everyone to dumfound. And looking for answers.  

 

As Morgan Greco says “ this one a crazy event though we will get over it.”

Rocketry Blog Post #4

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135 ft. That’s how high our second rocket went. Not nearly as high as our first rocket. I’m a little frustrated but it’s alright it still went high. At least now we know that a towering nose cone does not do us any favors.

 If we could try again I think the rocket should have had a different material for the fins that could have made it lighter, therefore, making it go higher.  I wish that I could have known this before building the second rocket I didn’t learn much from the first rocket so that might have been what made the second rocket not develop from the first one. 

If I ever wind up doing rocketry again at least I know precisely what not to do. 

Rocketry Blog Post #3

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This is our second attempt at building a successful sounding rocket. This time we were only allowed to change one part of our rocket the body, fins, etc. 

My group and I decided to change the nose cone because we think that it will make our rocket design more aerodynamic. For our initial rocket we made the nose cone really short so this time we are going to make it taller. We also think that will make the biggest impact on how high or low our rocket goes.

It was the same process as last time for the body we rapped the oaktag around a skinny PVC pipe and then to fasten it we wrapped it in blue and gray electrical tape. For the nose cone, we made it out of colored paper and we made the fins out cardboard. We attached everything with hot glue and electrical tape.

We can’t wait for the launch we hope it goes even better than last time!

Rocketry Blog Post #2

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The rocket launch was a lot different than expected. I never thought that the rockets would go that high!

 My groups rocket went so high when it came back down It made a hole in the ground and completely crushed our nose cone. We used special increments called clinometer to measure the height. 

After we graphed it turns our rocket went … 143 ft.! it went so high! I can’t wait for our second time at trying to build one that will even higher than our first design. 

Rocketry Blog Post #1

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When I found out that we were going to do a unit on rocketry i got so excited, I could not wait to start. I had always loved science I had been waiting to do this since 3rd grade when I first heard about it!

Designing the rocket was the hardest part, we kept disagreeing on how tall it would be, fin shape ,the amount of fins, ect. we finally came to a conclusion for it to be 16 in. tall, pointy and skinny nose cone and 3 fins the body. We thought this would be the most aerodynamic design for our rocket. But we didn’t want it to be light or the wind would knock it of course.

We made the nose cone pink  and attached it to the body of our rocket with white tape then we raped the body of our rocket with black tape and attached the fins with hot glue and tape to insure they wouldn’t fall off during the launch.

I can’t wait to see how high it goes!