Thursday, January 7, 2016

Azimuth And the Celestial Objects

The trip to the Planetarium was nice and successful, and I was happy to see that the kids really did retain most of what we had learned in Science way back in the year 2015. Mrs. Stemnock took a class photo of us in the darkened planetarium. She said it came in dark, and she sent it to me, but as of this writing I still haven't gotten it--sometimes it does take awhile when someone sends you something on an iPad.

When we got back, we did have an extra-long reading time for TGF5. The kids think--and I have to say I'm actually in agreement--that this story is starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Technically, we did start book one on the first day of school, and we are getting close to the end of the fifth and final book now. I have to admit that it does seem like the author (whose name I'm not even typing, nor the full book title, for fear that reading these words of derision would make him feel bad) kind of gave up during this last book, and isn't really giving a satisfying conclusion. Anyway, I didn't intend to write this long of a paragraph about how the book I'm reading out loud isn't actually all that good.

Alright, I thought I had posted this a long time ago, but I didn't. Have a good evening!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Googling doing a Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader Relay For Life event, and your blog came up. Looks like you may have done something like this in the past.. would you mind sharing your insights on what it looked like for your event?

Jeff said...

Hey, Patti. Thanks for asking. It's been quite awhile since we did that, and thanks for reminding me that we need to pull it out again!

It was pretty simple, really. I had my fifth graders write questions based on what we had done throughout the school year (this was a great way to review as well), and then at Relay for Life, I had students sign up for an hour as the "host" of the show (although we had the microphone taken from us for kids being a little too obnoxious hearing their own voice all around the football field).

Relay-ers could pay a dollar to take the challenge of a question written by a fifth grader. If they won, they received a little prize (something junky, I bought a ton of cheap prizes), and if not, then they didn't get anything.

Come to think of it, it might be a good idea to give the "loser" a dunce cap that they have to wear for one lap? Maybe it could advertise the "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" event at Relay? Just an idea.

Good luck with your event!