Hannah's Trip

Hey guys,

My name is Hannah. Recently, I went on a road trip to Long Beach, Washington. Long Beach is on the peninsula. See if you can spot it!

Anyways, it is a twelve hour trip, from Natomas. But, to make the time go by, we listened to music, and watched movies.

When we FINALLY got to Astoria (a city on the edge of Oregon,) we had to cross this gimungous bridge. Gimungous is a cross between gigantic and humungous, that I made up.

I was like "whoaaa"

It was scary. The border line between Washington and Oregon is in the middle of that bridge.

I was like "whoaaa" twice.

When we got to my aunts house, we said hi to her and her dog. We ate dinner, and we had lots of fun. Long Beach is like, farm land and trees. By the way, the weather is AWESOME!!!!!!!!

What's funny is, Long Beach is so small, I looked it up on google images, and I have been to most of the places in the pictures.

Anyway, we went to the ‘downtown’ of long beach, which is, well……….

Small. Small and crowded from tourists.

But it was awesome. We had ice cream for lunch. We went to the farmers market.

I tried watermelon fudge (it tastes really good).

So that’s my trip! Thanks for reading!

Friday Update 9/26/14

Hello! This is Sam and Karoliena, and we are writing our class’s first Friday update. We hope you like it!

On Monday, we read books with the kindergarten buddies in Mrs. Mandujano's class and the kindergarteners read to us too.I mean how great is it to have a chance to helped kindergarten kids? Isn’t that seriously awesome? They are so cute and adorable. They taught us how to do a dance called Tooty-Ta. We loved the dance so much. It felt amazing to help the cute little kids. It felt like we were tutors.

We just finished Wonder and the class  decided that we wanted to compare and contrast of the different characters in Wonder. It is an amazing book, so you should maybe read it. We loved it.

We also went to an assembly on Friday  9/26/14 and it was amazing!!! We all had so much fun watching  PFAA’s dance performance. It was awesome! I mean we’ve never seen anything like it. And we are so lucky PFAA is giving Star Academy students a chance to audition for a performance.

We hope you liked our blog! Wishing you a really good weekend!

Love,

Sam and Karoliena

Emily's Book Review

Hi everyone,

                    My name is Emily . I wanted to tell you about the book I just finished reading. It’s called Out Of My Mind. It is about a 10 year old girl ( Melody ) who is disabled. She can’t talk  or walk. It tells you about all the events that she goes through throughout one life changing year. Such as  meeting new people and being stuck in room H - 5. Throughout this book you can see what it is like in someone's shoes who is disabled. For sure thats what it did for me. This book is also very tragic. This book perfect if you want a real page turner.

Love one of Star Academy's  fantastic fifth graders,

Emily M   

                

Wonder and Precepts

Last week we finished our first read aloud of the year - Wonder, by R.J. Palacio. This book is about a fifth grader, August Pullman, who has severe facial deformities.

Here are some student responses to the book: 

Emily: It changed my perspective of how I see people with a disability or something you don't see every day. 

Rebecca: It made me think that just because somebody is different, it doesn't mean you should treat them differently because everybody is the same in a way. 

Larissa: It gave you two sides to the story because the bad guy might think that he's not doing anything wrong. 

Mia: I liked the book because Auggie was really brave to go to a regular school even though he knew he was going to be teased about his deformity and his face. 

Karoliena: It made me think don't judge people from what they look like. 

Will: If you bully somebody, it shows how they feel when they get bullied. 

AJ: It's like some of the characters in the book could be really nice and some people could be really mean. 

Arielle: The book is really awesome. 

Now, we are reading The Julian Chapter, which is a section of the book created after the book was published, told from the point of view of August's main tormenter. 

In the book Wonder, Mr. Browne, one of August's teachers, shares precepts, or "words to live by" with the students. R.J. Palacio has recently published a book of precepts. 

Each morning, we read the precept of the day and discuss what it means to us. This has become a very special time each morning, and we would like to share some of our thoughts with you (pause if you would like to stay on a particular slide longer than 5 seconds). 

Our first three weeks

We've had a great first three weeks in fifth grade! 

We have participated in lots of team challenges to get to know each other and build our classroom community.

We have really been enjoying Reading Workshop time! We've been reading lots of interesting books and sharing about them with each other. We are all on our way to accomplishing our goal of each reading 40 books this year!

On Fridays, we have Fitness Friday! We get to walk/jog to music for 25 minutes with all the 3rd-5th graders. It's a great time!

Last Monday, we started meeting with our Kindergarten buddies in Mrs. Mandujano's class. We helped them write their letters and then read them books. Everyone had a great time and we can't wait to see our buddies again! 

Here are our favorite things about fifth grade so far: 

Will: I like capture the duct tape and I like kindergarten buddies. (“Me too!” from most of the class)

Blake: I like how we built towers out of objects.

Bella: I like that we get to go around the room for reading workshop time.

Arielle: I like enrichment.

AJ: I like Fit Friday because I can walk with my friends.

Karoliena: I like reading Wonder with the whole class.

Quinn: I like to do math.

Larry: I like that we’re doing P.E. three times in the week.

Emily: I like how we all work together.

Gia: I liked how we built the bridges.

Mia: I like reading workshop because we get to choose the books we read.

Larissa: My favorite part about school is that there are a lot of good books in the class library.

Angeline: I like that I made new friends so far.

Alanna: I like in art class where we do Aboriginal dot art paintings.

Rebecca: I like the teachers and the kids so far.

Maddy: I like how we have Google accounts! (“Me too!” from most of the class)

Maggie: I like how we get to eat snacks in the classroom.

Aliyah: I like reading workshop because I like to read.

Mimi: I like that we get privileges.

Diana: I like how we can do e-mails.

Isaac: I like that we have access to computers.

Danielle: I like playing jot thoughts with our groups.

Paul: I liked making the silhouettes.

Marissa: I like playing capture the duct tape in P.E. and my speech enrichment class.

Bruce: I like the engineering enrichment class.

Melina: I like reading workshop because it introduces me to different genres.

Mrs. Rohrbacker: I like that our class works together so well and we always have a lot of fun!