February 16

The Journey Over

At school we finally finished our stop motion project! My group and I have been working sooo hard on our project and my group and I finished today! I am so excited that we finished  first because we got to see what it looks like after we did a lot of work. I think that we finished first because our immigration movie wasn’t that long and our letter wasn’t that long. After we finished filming we had to import it to imovie.

The way that we recorded our voices onto imovie is we had this round recorder that stands up and we press play on that and on imovie. Audrey and I switched off saying the letter and it worked out really well.

In our imovie we printed out a paper guy and colored him in. Then we glued him to cardboard and we glued cardboard on the bottom to make him stand up. His name was Jonathan. We also printed out a paper “mother” and colored her in and did the same to her with the cardboard. She was Jonathan’s mother. They were on steerage. We made a bench made out of popsicle sticks for them to sit on. Then we had a green screen and painted the pizza box green until we got a steerage background. We made little pictures that we bring into the the immigration set while they talk about things like steerage, the dining rooms etc.

Overall we did great and had so much fun!

Here is the imovie my group and I made:

 

Here are some pictures during the project:

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February 12

A Long Walk To Water – Read Aloud At School

In school my teacher has been reading a book to my class and it’s called A Long Walk To Water by Lind Sue Park. Here are the questions my teacher gave us to answer:

1: What are the qualities of effective leadership?

2: How does Salva demonstrate these qualities?

  • How might Salva’s philosophy help you in your life?
  • Why is perseverance so important?
  • How can you better develop the ability to persevere?

 

The qualities of effective leadership are respect others, honesty, work as a team/teamwork, courage etc. One word that I think fits best for qualities of effective leadership is confidence. The reason why I think confidence is the best word to fit this is because you need to be confident and you need to show confidence if you are a leader of a group. I think Salva demonstrates these qualities by working as a team with his “group”. I think this because there is a lot of fighting going around and I think that Salva tries to work as a team to keep everybody safe although his uncle did get killed by the soldiers. He also fits the word confident a lot. He is so confident to be walking outside finding food and also being near the soldiers which could be very dangerous. Also he walks around with no shoes on which also could be very dangerous. He could hurt his foot by stepping on something that is prickly or is like a needle. I think that he is very confident to be doing all of these things outside.

 

Salva’s philosophy can help me in my life because if something is hard or scary for Salva like going near the soldiers he just does it and he has so much confidence. That can help me in my life because when something is hard, challenging or scary for me I can just think back to Salva and say to myself , “if Salva is doing something challenging for him and he just it and has so much confidence, why can’t I just do what I’m going to do with so much confidence?” Once I do that I will get used to that feeling and just go ahead and do the thing that is challenging for me with so much confidence in me. I feel that Salva is teaching a great lesson here which is to always persevere. This lesson is not just going to me, it is going everybody in the world. Perseverance is so important because you have to learn how to persevere if something is challenging for you and there are a lot of things in the world that are challenging. If you don’t learn how to persevere than a lot of things in the world will be a big obstacle for you. Even though overcoming your obstacle is a good thing because you learn a lot from it, it also could be a bad thing because then you won’t be able to do a lot of things in the world because you didn’t learn how to have perseverance. I think a good way to develop the ability to persevere is to go and try new and challenging things in the world that will make you have perseverance because than you will get the feeling and then things will be easier for you to do in the world.

 

Category: 5th Grade, Reading | 3 Comments on A Long Walk To Water – Read Aloud At School
February 6

Part 2: Immigration StopMotion Project

Today we worked on some more immigration work. One of the problems that we had last time was we didn’t know who was going to say the letter. Our solution was Audrey and I are going to both say parts of the letter and we thought that would work after we thought more about it.

My group and I thought about this project more and we realized that it would be better if we made Jonathan and his mom standing up so that they can move around and not just sit the whole time. So we put a really small piece of popsicle stick on the bottom of the two characters so they would stand up. They didn’t fall over and it worked pretty well.

That was our learning experience today.

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February 5

Part 1: Immigration StopMotion Project

In class we started filming our immigration project although we came across some challenges along the way. In my group we made a letter that our character, Jonathan, “reads” and we are still deciding who will read the letter. Also we first set up our background/set against kids lockers and some of the kids were coming out and getting things from their locker. That meant that we couldn’t set up our project there so we had to find a new place to film. We found a quiet place against the brick wall which was perfect.

Next time we work on our project we will try to finish our project. Finding backgrounds are hard so we might spend a few minutes next time working on that. My group and I also might add some more narration and words for other people in my group to say.

The way we film is we have a little camera that is connected to a computer and we can angle the camera which ever way we want and we can see the way we are putting the camera on the computer. Every time we film we press the button on the computer and take a picture and keep taking pictures when we move things around the set.

Thats all we did today and I know we will get more things done the next time we work on this project. I can’t wait to see the final project all done!

 

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January 18

Likes and Dislikes

When doing this project there are some likes and dislikes. Some things that I like about this project is we get to be creative and use our imagination to build our own Rube Goldberg simple machine with our group. Also, we get to find different materials and use them in different ways which I thought was cool opportunity.

Some things I disliked about this project is it can be challenging to create a Rube Goldberg simple machine but at the end you are proud of yourself. Another thing that I disliked about this project is there are many fun and creative ideas that you can put into this project but your group has to agree with you and sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to.

Some things that I LOVE about this project is everybody gets to share their ideas and their thinking. What I like about sharing our ideas is that when we hear other ideas we can learn from them and create even more ideas!

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January 18

Problems We Faced

Throughout this project we faced many problems. We always had a solution that turned the problem into something new or fixed the problem. We had a lot of the same problems which were disagreements. We had a lot of them. One disagreement we had was we couldn’t decide if we should keep the elevations on the cardboard because we didn’t know if it would work and we didn’t know if it would add a cool feature. We were arguing a little about that.

Another problem we faced was whenever we tried the whole simple machine and we set it up again, we always would hit another domino and then all of the dominos would fall down which made us set up the whole machine again. The lesson is to BE CAREFUL! Here is a suggestion: two people setting up the machine is not a good idea because when two people set it up, it gets too confusing and someone can hit the other person and the whole thing falls down.

The last problem we faced was some of the steps we did didn’t work when we tried it. One example is when we attached string to the ladder and string to the ball, the ball fell out of the string so we needed to find a way to keep the string tied to the ball so when we swing the ball it won’t fall out of string. When we tied the string around the ball many times it still fell out. We had one choice which was to wrap the string around the ball SO MANY TIMES! It worked!

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January 18

Our Goal

For the Rube Goldberg project each group had to think about a goal they want to achieve at the end of their simple machine. These are the steps my group and I did to come up with a goal:

#1: My group and I brainstormed some ideas for what our goal is going to be. We realized we needed to actually share our ideas and talk about it together as a group to see what we were thinking.

#2: Leila got the paper and we all wrote down our ideas on the paper. We ended up having about 10-12 ideas for goals.

#3: We wrote tally marks to the ones we liked the best. Two of the ideas got three tally marks because we liked the idea the best. It came down to one out of the two ideas. We decided that our goal is for something to play the radio and we will decide on a song to play.

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January 18

Materials For Rube Goldberg

For this project we had to write a list of materials or things that we used to build the Rube Goldberg simple machine. My group and I used many materials and things to build this simple machine. The most common thing we used was dominos. Some of the other things we used were balls, a train track/train, cups, cardboard, a car and popsicle sticks. One problem that we faced was that some of the materials we used didn’t actually work. One example is when we put the cardboard on the ground a little slanted and put train tracks on it with a train on the train tracks, the train wasn’t working and was trying to get over the little hill but couldn’t make it. After that we had to think about what we would do about that. To replace that we came up with a using different materials. We used a skinny tube and a marble. The marble rolls down the tube and hits the train which makes that move down the tracks. We always had a solution to the problems that we faced.

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January 9

Planning For Rube Goldberg Project

For the Rube Goldberg project you always have to have a plan. My group and I have so many Ideas! For this project you have to plan many things: who’s house are you doing the project at?, do you have the same schedule as the other people in your group?, what materials might we want to use?, what is the coarse going to be like?, who is going to film the videos?, who is going to talk in the videos? and who is going to start the coarse?.

What’s really helpful is writing it down and planning on paper so you have it when you need it. You can also change things and add things like my group did.

So far My group and I planned out our schedules, what the coarse is going to be like, who’s house we are doing it at and who’s starting off the coarse. My group and I are switching for everything. One time I talk and then I start it off etc.

I think our planning is very organized and we will do great during this project!

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January 9

Rube Goldberg Project

At school the whole fifth grade does a Rube Goldberg Project. Each class gets partners and works together to make a cool “simple machine” using different materials. At the end you have to try to reach your goal. You and your group can come up with anything for your goal such as: something pulling a door closed or having food in a cup and something pushing the food into a bowl. There are many ways you can make this project successful. My class got to pick their partners. My partners are my friends Audrey and Leila.

For this project you have to go to each other’s house and work on it all together. Once you have built it, you take videos of the “simple machine”. You have to take videos of it when it fails or doesn’t reach the goal and when it works. For the whole “simple machine” to work successfully it takes about 50 tries! Sometimes even more!

There’s a lot of steps to do this and maybe you and your class will do! So far it has been a really fun experience!

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