We wrapped up our  non-fiction reading unit by being Experts that Grow Knowledge across Books. We gathered in groups to create a presentation on a topic. After we created our posters, we practiced our presentations. We used our voices to emphasoze keywords and didn't speak too fast. Our audience was mesmerized by our presentations!

Our task was to prevent the red houses from moving when we poured 500ml of water on the model. We learned a lot about how to prevent the houses from moving (left model) and how much they can move (right model). 

Room 8 wrote cards to our Veterans. Some of the children wrote to a family member. The children thanked the veterans for their service to our country. "Dear Veterans, Thank you for serving our country. And sacrificing by being away from your family." "Thank you Pop, for saving our lives from the bad people. I am glad that you did it. And thank you for sacrificing fr u and our people and staying away from your family so we could survive fromt he bad people who wanted to win the war." 
Thank you to all who served and who continue to serve!

We wondered how many students were at Burr. We represented each class of 17 with a ten block and seven ones. Then we grouped up the ones in groups of ten and traded them in for a ten block. Then we traded  in the ten blocks for a hundreds block. The first time we tried, we were not paying attention and ended up with an extra hundred block--oops--we used persistance and we tried again! This time we paid attention to our precision  and got 278 students. Next we looked up the answer on the Burr Website. We used what we know about reading non-fiction to look for the headings on a page. We found the heading AND we found a label in bold face with a colon after it, which means "Pay Attention! I am going to give you  imprtant information!" 

After we confirmed the answer for the number of students at Burr, we were curious about the other elementary school. Back to the websites! We made a graph of how many students were in each elementary school and put our answers on a number line. It is weird to have a number line start at 190! Next we had to answer how many more students were at Burr than at Haddam. We used a variety of tools to figure out the answer. Using the number line was one way to think about the problem!