5th Grade: Interactive Inklewriter Story Links!

Fifth graders spent all year building up an imaginary civilization attribute by attribute, from geography to mythology, from basic crops to language and number systems. There were thousands of possible ways to wrap up their study, but we went with a free online program called Inklewriter that allows students to create interactive, reader-driven stories. Their task was to create an interactive story full of reader options that told the story and details of their civilization indirectly along the way. I think you'll enjoy!

NOTE: Although I guided and consulted students as much as possible, they were responsible for their own editing, grammar-checking and link-testing. With our limited time each week, I chose to focus on the development of their ideas as opposed to the meticulousness of their writing.

Now have fun!

Ben W: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/g69x

Alex Z: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/nh3q

Annie T: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/jh3q

Jai G.     http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/dm3q

RYAN Y. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/4dfz

Tom P: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/48wb

Chihchia Y. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/xwn6

Kristen. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/cb64

Jeffrey W. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/3z82

Ava J.: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/zh3d

Anica: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/fghp

Emma R: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/qzd9

Siddhartha: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/q69x

Prisha: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/g8wb

Katherine: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/8pqf

Riya: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/f4xc

Elaine: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/5nd9

Adit: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/44xc

Santosh: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/wwn6

 Amelie: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/gghp

Neha: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/zmpd

Navya: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/cz82

 Kylie: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/bzgm

Ritvik: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/59j8

Marjan: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/9jgm

Tommy C.: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/mmpd

Divya: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/2nqf

If your child's story does not appear here, then they did not finish in class and were asked to finish as homework and send me the link. It's not too late!

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Fifth Grade Update: The Rise of Civilizations

Bit by bit throughout the year we've been inventing and developing our own civilizations by taking inspiration from real civilizations throughout history, both real and fictional. 

Most recently we've added two new attributes to our civilizations and both gave the opportunity to also practice our creative thinking skills of FFOE and SCAMPER.

Constellations

After studying constellations and their associated myths and legends from various cultures, students designed their own and then wrote a myth to accompany it. The myth needed to somehow form a piece of the mythology of their civilization and reflect something about their civilization's geography, resources, beliefs, etc.

Fruits

Every classic civilization has it's staple food crop. After watching a clip from the intriguing documentary The Fruit Hunters, we decided to make our staples fruits. We got inspiration from the adaptations of real life rare and exotic fruits and created our own. To call our fruits "exotic" would be a huge understatement!

Next up is the culmination of our civilization project in the form of a dynamic, reader-interactive story using the online site http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/. Watch for those stories to be posted before the end of the year.

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January Update: A Busy Month Culminates in Applied Technology

I found myself with access to a stack of iPads this week and couldn't let the opportunity pass. I quickly updated my plans to incorporate a technology piece that was a perfect extension of the work and explorations we'd been doing at each grade level. Here, then, is a quick summary by grade level of what our January has been all about and then a note about how we used tech this week to enhance and extend our learning.

1st

We've transitioned into visual/spatial reasoning in January, which is a fancy way of saying we've been developing the problem-solving muscles in our brains that utilize visual information to find logical patterns in forms, shapes, colors, etc. We've used two classic geometrical tools to do this: tangrams and pentominoes. This week with the iPads we focused on 3 nice apps to apply these developing skills: Blockaders, Zentomino HD Lite and Zen HD Lite - Relaxing Tangrams. They are all free, find them for your devices!

Tangrams consist of 7 pieces

Pentominoes consist of 12 pieces of 5 sections each

2nd

2014 has been all about roller coasters! We started with some of the basic science, like how coasters get their speed and what "G force" is. Then we went into research mode and dug up some detailed information on famous coasters throughout the world. On the iPads this week, we found the perfect app to begin testing our own coaster engineering skills: Coaster Frenzy. Students have to design, test, and modify their track in order to increase speed and make the ride fun. There is also a wonderful creative aspect to designing a coaster that would be safe AND fun.

3rd

Using Benjamin Franklin's fascination with magic squares as a trigger, we've been playing around with "magic math," especially different types of magic squares. That led us over to a cousin of the magic square, sudoku, and all 3rd graders have now been formally introduced to that classic (and addictive) game. The apps we used this week were ProMagic Square and Sudoku 2. There are probably several thousand sudoku games out there, but this one was a hit for its easy interface.

4th

Well, pentominoes and more pentominoes! As you know, students created 3-D pentominoes at home using 5 6x6x6 inch cubes. We are using those in class for real-life architecture challenges, like the reading nooks we have lovingly called "pentominooks." This week with the iPads we stuck on the theme of pentominoes but with a special creative twist: students used the app iMovie to create movie trailers in which the characters, theme and title all centered around pentominoes in some way. I will share those soon in a separate post.

5th

OK, 5th is the one grade that didn't indulge much in the iPads. We've been busy, though. In January we kicked off a long-term unit on Mindset--a way of framing and perceiving the world and yourself for long-term success and growth. At the same time, we are continuing with our civilization projects. Most recently, students designed (with elaborate detail) the fictional fruits that are the basis of their civilizations. We got some inspiration for our fruit creations from a documentary called Fruit Hunters. We only saw the trailer in class, but Mr. Koch has seen the whole thing and recommends it (Netflix)! :)

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5th Grade Update: Creating New Civilizations

There isn't anything too flashy to share for 5th grade, but we've been doing a LOT of ground work in terms of research and idea building for our civilization projects. After our research of various number systems from civilizations throughout history, students have begun designing their own number systems. Will it be a base 10? Base 5? Base 20? How many digits/numerals will it use? Ten like the Hindu-Arabic system we use today? How will you represent large numbers? With a place value system? With a coded way of putting the numerals in a specific order? There are MANY questions and considerations!

Aside from number systems, we've also researched the overall makeup of civilizations, such as geography, economy, government, clothing, natural resources, diet, entertainment, education and so on. Our goal is to take the best and the interesting and the successful from these classic civilizations and adapt them to our own as we create them.

Building background with civilization research

Studying the complexities of the Roman Numeral System

In addition to our civilization project, we've been toning, reviewing and practicing some important thinking skills, including logical reasoning, analogies, and practice with the Six Thinking Hats.

 

If you are not familiar with Six Thinking Hats, here is an excellent article to give you some background.

These are all ways of getting our 5th graders ready for the intense and challenging leap into Middle School academics. Another key component I will be implementing right here on the blog is our Word of the Week challenge. Just look for posts with the title or tag "Word of the Week" and have students review the word and its definition. Then, they add a comment using that word in a sentence to earn "blog points." These blog points will be redeemed later. : )

Last, but not least, nearly every 5th grader has now finished his comic on "Encounters." They make for a colorful and entertaining wall. Visitors to the room are always immediately drawn to them, and often get "stuck" in that part of the room as they try to read them! 

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5th Grade: To Boldly Go...

The encounter of civilizations is our driving theme in 5th grade this year. To start generating a list of the attributes of civilizations and also to explore what kinds of consequences arise out of two civilizations encountering each other, we read the book Encounter by Jane Yolen:

Next, to extrapolate this concept of an encounter and put our own current civilization into the story, students created comics that imagined the first contact between modern humans and an "alien civilization." Yes, they have been a lot of fun, but creating them also forced us to reflect on the basic attributes of civilizations (i.e. government, economy, currency, clothing, language, number system, holidays, norms, etc.).

Then we read the story of a boy who was so fed up with his own civilization, who felt so left out and unrecognized, that he literally invented his own from the ground up. Meet Weslandia:

With Weslandia as our inspiration, we've now begun the gradual process of designing our own civilizations. We are starting with Math, or course! OK, it wouldn't have been everyone's choice, but you have to start somewhere. So far, we've studied the number systems of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. We'll also study some more modern systems, like binary, before we start creating our own number systems.

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