Recycling Presentations

Our recycling presentations were awesome!  When the students finished preparing their presentations, which went through several revisions, the students did many practice presentations. Following these practices, they reflected on their performances and received feedback from their classmates and me. We talked about making eye contact with the audience, speaking loudly and slowly, facing their audience, being serious, and not talking to their group mates if something went awry. The improvements were amazing.  

Because it was hard to get a clean video of the children presenting in the classes that we visited (we tried), I decided to tape them presenting to their own classmates in our classroom.  Those are the videos that you will be seeing.  Following our presentations, the class created a checklist to assess how well they presented.  Here is a copy of that checklist: recycling rubric.pdf  Each group sat down and watched the videos of their presentations.  As they watched, they filled out the checklist and reflected on what they learned and how they could improve.  These reflections will be included in their portfolios.

Plastic Bottle Presentations.m4v
Plastic Bottle 2 Presentations.m4v
paper presentation.m4v
Aluminum Can 2 Presentations.m4vPlease enjoy the videos.  I am currently fighting with the computer to have the actual keynotes available.  When I win, I will include them on this page.

***I had the children revise their homework checklist and tables.  If there's any confusion, I put the revised version up in the homework section.

Posted at 2:49 PM| Permalink

Upcoming Field Trips and Events!

Saturday, 10/27/07. Admissions Open House! 4th graders sign the permission slip if they want to be tour guides.

Tuesday, 10/30/07. Manoa Heritage Center! 9:15-10:45.  We are going to visit the Heritage Center as an introduction to our study of the Ahupua`a of Manoa.

Wednesday, 10/31/07. Halloween!  Spooktivity!

Friday, 11/2/07. Foster Garden! 9:00-11:15.  We are going to visit the Talipot tree, which is very rare and only flowers once in its lifetime (now).  Ms. Brooks will be joining us to work with the children on their paintings.

Tuesday, 11/6/07. Manoa Stream Tour! 10:00-11:30.  To further study our Ahupua`a, we will be following Manoa Stream from the uka (mountains) to the kai (sea).  We will be making four stops along the way to sketch and record our observations.

Monday, 11/12/07. Veterans Day!  No School.

Wednesday, 11/14/07. Graham Salisbury Visit!  Graham Salisbury is the author of Under the Blood Red Sun, the book we are reading now.

***If you would like to join us on any of our field trips, please let me know.

Posted at 7:50 AM| Permalink

Quick Note

Hi, Pueo families! 

Sorry, just a quick note for you today.

We had to do a bit of rescheduling so that we could coordinate with the classes we're visiting.  We will be presenting to the fifth grade on Monday and to the 1-2 Multiage on Thursday. Your child should have taken home what they are saying for their presentation so they can practice over the weekend or next week. Thanks!

Your child will also be bringing home a copy of Storyworks.  Homework is to read one of the pieces, "Bronx Treasure."  We will be discussing this story in class.  I also gave them only three vocabulary journal sheets with words from this story.  Those are the only vocabulary journal pages they are responsible for this week.

Thank you for taking the time to go over your child's energy ideas last week.  I was very impressed and inspired by what you came up with.

Please tune in next week for information on upcoming field trips.

Posted at 1:25 PM| Permalink

Recycling

One of the main goals of our study of the ahupua`a of Manoa is to recognize the relationship that people have to the land and how they work together to use and protect the resources that the land provides.  We want to look at how people in this ahupua`a of Manoa lived and worked together in the past and how they live and work together today. To start, we decided to focus on own smaller community of Mid-Pacific Elementary School.  When Mr. K left, we no longer had a recycling program in the elementary school.  We decided to fill that need by taking over the recycling of cans and bottles and adding paper recycling.  In addition to filling that immediate need in our community and helping to keep our campus clean, we also looked at how our recycling efforts affect our Hawai`i community and our global community by studying about how recycling benefits us.  To prepare for recycling, our students have been gathering information to present our recycling program to the rest of the school.  We didn’t want to just collect everyone’s recycling without educating our community on why it is important to recycle and how we can avoid recycling altogether by reducing usage and re-using these resources.

As a class we came up with questions to research like Why should we recycle?  What happens when we recycle?  What would happen if we didn’t recycle?  What kinds of products are made out of the recycled goods?  What can we recycle? We will be recycling plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and white paper so we split into those three groups. Because all the third and fourth grade classes are in charge of recycling and we  felt that it was important for everyone to share this information with rest of the school, we decided to divide up all the classes in the elementary school and visit each class individually.  Our class is in charge of educating Ms. Field’s 1-2 multi-age class and Mr. Black’s 5th grade class. Because these are such varied ages, our groups had to carefully consider how they were going to present their information to each particular audience. Our groups have chosen to do either keynote presentations or prepare posters to help share their information. Some groups are even making hand-outs (printed on recycled paper, of course).   
I know that you would love to see these presentations, but because we will be doing our presentations in the other classrooms to teach that class, I worry that it might be a distraction. But not to worry, because I am very excited to try making a pod-cast and I think our presentations are a perfect opportunity.  We will film our presentations and make them into pod-casts that you can download and watch.  We will be presenting next Friday, but I don’t expect the pod-casts to be up and watch-able until at least the next week.
As an appropriate aside, we had a guest speaker, Brian Kealoha from Energy Solutions, come speak to the third-fifth grades.  Mr. Kealoha talked to the kids about how we get energy and how they could reduce their energy usage.  We even got some prizes because we were so knowledgeable about how energy use effects our environment.  He asked the kids to do some homework, so I made it officially part of our weekly homework (instead of our reading assignment).  The children are supposed to list all the ways that they use energy (electricity), how they could reduce that usage, and then discuss it with you.

Posted at 6:48 AM| Permalink