My science classes are currently learning about earthquakes and the effects of them. Students are working in groups to create "earthquake-proof" structures out of spaghetti and gumdrops that will surpass my earthquake similator and prove to be safe structures! We are currently in the building process, so here are a few pictures of the progress so far. More pictures are to come once the structures are complete and ready to be tested! They are looking GREAT so far and some students are even implementing techniques they learned in their Building Trades class to create very stable structures!

My science classes just learned about volcanic eruptions and the types of volcanoes. Each class created volcano models and determined whether the eruptions were "quiet" or "explosive" based on what we learned in class. Here is an action shot of one of the volcanoes!

The week of Thanksgiving, each of my classes participated in activities related to Thanksgiving whether it was learning about the "truth" of Thanksgiving and what became of it in Social Studies or learning to "give thanks" in Social Skills. My science classes experimented with traditional Thanksgiving foods to test them for starch! Here are some pictures from the experiment!

Currently in my science classes students are learning about fossils and the importance of them. They got to see what it was like to be paleontologists for a day by cutting out a set of bones and putting them together to create an unknown creature, which they ended up realizing it was a T-Rex! This was an inquiry lesson where students used their imagination, background knowledge, and what information they could get from a picture of a human skeleton to put the pieces together. Here is a picture of the bulletin board we created outside the classroom to display the students' awesome work!

Students in my reading class have been engaging in a lot of activities relating to our reading in Holes. On our bulletin board, we currently have work displayed from a career activity where students had to research and write about a career they might be interested in pursuing.

Also, when the students were introduced to a new character, the Warden, in the story, they used the description in the book to draw detailed pictures of her.