Earlier this year we created first person narratives in which we pretended to be passengers on the Mayflower. In 1620, 102 brave souls traveled from Plymouth, England to a strange new land called America. Among them were the Pilgrims who were traveling to America for religious freedom.
How brave are you? Would you take such a risk and travel to the strange new land? Check out VoiceThread first and decide.
Week 6’s challenge was all about work and so Evan and I created this Glogster poster about our dream job.
What’s your dream job?
I love Legos and one day over Spring Break I was expecting my new blue Lego jet to come in the mail. Suddenly a man walked up to our house and put down a box and left. I ran rapidly up to the box and picked it up and ran it to my bedroom and opened it! It was my blue Lego jet with guns. I couldn’t wait so I started working on it! There were tons of parts so I thought, “This is going to take a long time.” The way I put together the parts was hard because you had to put together creases to creases. At the last piece I got stuck because the last piece was a rubber band. I felt so frustrated with it because when I tried to stretch it over I thought it was going to snap. It took me awhile before it worked but it eventually worked. It took me an hour and thirty minutes to build my Lego. I felt relieved and happy after I finished my Lego. I can’t wait until my next Lego!
For Week 7’s challenge Gayle, Kyra, and I worked as a team and got creative. We visited three fun website. You can see what we created below.
I went to Make Beliefs Comix website. You get to create your very own comic strip on this website. I think it was pretty easy to use once I got used to the different menu choices and a lot of fun. I felt like a real comic person making this comic strip.
Emi's comic on Make Beliefs ComixK
Kyra went to This is Sand. On this website you create sand art by moving the mouse around the page. Kyra recommends this page because it helps people show their artistic side. It’s fun and easy to use too. You can do black and white or color sand art.
Kyra's sand creation
And Gayle went to Blabberize. This website was also a lot of fun and made us laugh a lot. It’s a bit tricky to figure out. Gayle managed to upload a picture and create a blabber and even record a poem but she couldn’t figure out to make the mouth line up properly. We think this site would be a fun way to share ideas or tell stories.
Week 6’s blogging challenge is about work and so I decided to write about volunteer work at an organization in San Diego that wants to keep San Diego clean. I Love a Clean San Diego, “…leads and educates our community to actively conserve and enhance the environment.” They teach people about waste reduction and to not waste water, recycling, proper disposal of household hazardous waste, and storm water pollution prevention. Two people, Bob and Jan Rogers, saw a reason for beach clean up, and awareness about limited water supply in San Diego. Now they provide beach clean up and bay clean up. Bob and Jan say “It’s a great learning experience for kids.”
Volunteers at PAWS foster dogs and cats until they find a permanent home.
Week 6’s challenge about work made me think of my mom’s friend who has a very interesting job. Would you like to find out about it? If so, keep on reading.
Her name is Elle and she volunteers for PAWS as an animal foster parent for cats and dogs. And you ask what do animal foster parents do? They take care of animals until they are old enough for adoption. We think the funnest part would be naming them and playing with them.
The purpose of this organization, PAWS is to make sure that the animals are safe and ready for adoption when they are older. PAWS is saving lots of animals. especially cats and dogs that are in danger. PAWS saves more than 1,000 animals each year. We think…
Dog tongues are red, some cats feel blue so that’s why we want you to save one too. Maybe you can make a donation to PAWS or even volunteer your time?
My Spring Break was amazing, I went to SeaWorld …twice! I went with my mom, dad, sister, and brother. My all time favorite part of all the times that I was at SeaWorld over break was going to Rocky Point Preserve to pet the dolphins. When I was reaching over to pet one, it splashed right on me with its tail. I got soaked from head to toe. I was dripping like a seaweed monster just coming out of the ocean. I felt like one of the pieces of seaweed that’s on the gigantic beast. I looked like a freak. I also smelled like a fish. My mom said that the dolphin liked me… I doubted that. The same thing happened the next time I went there too! Even though I was upset at the time, I realized that it was really funny! I can’t wait to go to SeaWorld again!
On the second day that I went to SeaWorld I bought a Shamu. But since I was so wet from the dolphins splashing me I could not touch any of the stuffed animals that were in the store. The only thing that I could touch was my money that I payed for the Shamu with. It was excruciating. But at least I got my shamy!
Here’s what I learned about Father’s Joe’s Villages for week 6’s challenge. Some of this information is from the website.
Father Joe’s Villages began over 60 years. It started as a small chapel. It is the largest provider of homeless services in both San Diego and Riverside countries. Father Joe’s villages provide solutions to help meet the needs of homeless neighbors, regardless of their race, culture, beliefs, or age. When they take in a new client they provide food, clothing, housing,health care, education, job training, and child development in a nationally modeled “one-stop-shop” approach. Every night Father Joe’s provide a home for more than 1,200 people. This includes over 200 children and over 200 military veterans. Another 2,000 people seek the service. Lots of people volunteer at Father Joe’s Villages. So if you want to stop homelessness, then please step up to the plate and donate to Father Joe’s today!
Week 6’s challenge made me think about my volunteer work. Every year I volunteer for the MDA aka Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. My Aunt Mandy is the head of it! Every year my family heads up to this TV station an the telethon begins! I go up on the stage to be on TV with my Aunt Mandy and Jerry Lewis. Then, I go into the telethon booths to collect the checks. My Aunt Mandy has Muscular Dystrophy too. 
Atribbution:
http://www.mda.org/news/pop-ups/vans.html
Petco Park, San DiegoPadres in their camoflouge uniforms doing the pledge
Week 6’s challenge made me think about my dream job. My dream job is to be a professional baseball player in the M.L.B. I play little league right now and are team name is the Padres (retro) this year the actual Padres bought all of the jerseys for the teams. All the teams our different Padres uniforms. (They donated money to the whole San Diego County.) I practice every day. I even made my own pitching mound in my back yard made out of a brick and some dirt.
The best teams in the M.L.B right now are the L.A. Dodgers, N.Y Yankees, and Boston Red Soxs. The team that I would like to be on is the Boston Red Soxs even if that means moving to Boston. In little league we travel to Mission Bay and Presidio.
Our field is 200 feet from home plate to out of the park center field. The positions that I like are shortstop, pitcher, and first base. Now you know my dream job, what’s yours?
Attribution: Original description: Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego personnel attended a weekend at Petco Park Sept. 17-18. The San Diego Padres donated tickets to the USO to distribute to military organizations thought the city. Pvt. Charlie Chavez
Hiking in Palm Springs
Hi, my name is Riley and here’s what I did for Spring Break.Over Spring Break I got hurt while hiking with my family. I was hiking up a mountain trail in Palm Springs. When I reached the top, I turned around and bolted down and headed for the exit of the trail. When I got to the bottom, I waited and waited. I was thinking, “How long is it going to take them to get down here?” I decided to walk over to a look at an odd looking palm tree. When I was leaning on the tree, I lifted up my heel. “AHHH! Ow!” I scraped my heel which made me jump forward. SMACK! My head hit an Agave cactus plant. I put my hand over my head. When I took it off I saw blood on my hand. I rubbed the mark and I felt a half grape sized lump on my forehead. So that’s all. Make sure you never go near a palm tree surrounded by any type of cactus.
Agave plant
Attribution: See page for author [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
Volunteers clean up a beach
So Weeks 6’s blogging challenge has us thinking about what types of volunteer work people do in our own community. Since we just researched water problems in our community, like pollution, we decided to find out if there are any volunteers working to solve these problems. We are currently writing posts about a couple of organizations that help keep our waterways and beaches clean.
We are also researching information about a canyon called Rose Canyon because we know there’s a group called Friends of Rose Canyon who help keep the canyon clean. We wondered what else do these volunteers do? And so, we are also writing a post about the Friends of Rose Canyon.
Many of us have actually done volunteer work also and we are writing about that too.
We hope to put up our posts by the end of the week.
Attribution: Photo by U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jay C. Pugh [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Racing go carts
My name is Wesley, and here is my blog challenge for Week 5. Over Spring Break I rode go carts at Boomers. My sister and I sped around the big track as fast as we could. The pedal was pushed all the way down to the floor of the go cart. As I came around the corners I was thinking, “Oh no! I’m going to crash!” I bumped her car and she bumped my car so hard that I swerved all over the road. At the end of the race I sped in front of her and she bumped me so hard I was stuck against the railing. So the Boomer’s worker came over. I was thinking, Carly why did you do that? He looked at me with a mean face and yanked my car right out of the spot I got stuck in. I kept going but then it was the end. Next time I will not race my sister… I’ll race my dad or my mom instead of racing her.
Here’s our response to Week 5’s challenge and how we spent our vacation. Our school was on Spring Break the first week of April. We certainly got around, traveling near and far. Kaya went to Utah skiing. Dillon went rock climbing in Joshua Tree. Mrs. McKelvey went golfing in Palm Desert. Riley went hiking in Palm Springs. And, Emi even traveled all the way to Les Arcs in France!
Mieke spent two days over Spring Break painting a wall board court at school. Her design won the school wide competition for third grade and so she got to paint it onto one of the wall boards on our playground. It’s a picture of the world with our school perched on top of it. And it looks amazing!
Presley’s Spring Break wasn’t very exciting but he does get to live in a new house now…you see his family moved houses. And that can be exciting. Rebecca didn’t have much fun either because she had to visit the doctor about her foot pain. She’s going to need surgery on it this summer.
Nicole celebrated her 9th birthday and ate at her favorite burger restaurant. She gets to shop at her favorite store soon and pick out her gift.
Sophia went to Sea World not once, but twice…and got doubly wet! When she leaned over to pet a dolphin it splashed her with his tail. She was dripping wet!
Over all, we had a fabulous Spring Break! We are now busy preparing narrative paragraphs and we will post them to a VoiceThread by the end of the week. So check back in with us and learn more about our vacation.
Meanwhile, here are a few pictures for you to enjoy.
Make a video of your own at Animoto.
The challenge for Week 4:Make it global, had us thinking about water issues in our area. After doing some research and thinking about what we already know, we can tell you that San Diego has two main issues. These issues are: a limited water supply because of where we live; and pollution of our waterways, including our bays and ocean.
San Diego has a limited water supply because we have a mild climate and San Diego is a dry desert-like land. We usually see 41 days of rain a year compared to other U.S. cities that see 110 days of rain on average each year. In San Diego our average temperature in spring is 69/47 Fahrenheit, summer is 83/58 Fahrenheit, fall (autumn) is 73/50 Fahrenheit, and winter is 59/40 Fahrenheit. So you see our climate is very mild and it hardly rains. Most of our water is imported from Northern California and the Colorado River by huge aqueducts.
We also struggle with pollution in the waterways. San Diego is located on the coast by the Pacific Ocean. We have large bays too, like the San Diego Bay and Mission Bay. These bodies of water are often polluted due to water run off when it rains. The chemicals used on lawns and gardens are washed off and into the storm drains when it rains. Also, oil from leaky cars and other chemical spills are washed into the drains too. This water then empties directly into the ocean and bays polluting the water.
Mission Bay in San Diego, California, is often polluted by storm drain run off.
Also, RVs and boats sometimes don’t use dump stations for waste and empty the waste into the waterways instead. This is illegal of course and pollutes the water. We were really surprised to learn that about 10% of the water pollution in Mission Bay is caused by birds too.Trash is also a source of pollution.
There are lots of things that we can do to conserve or save water, and keep our waterways clean. Here are a few things we thought of:
What do you suggest we do to save water or prevent pollution?
Attribution: By Philkon (Phil Konstantin) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Dear Parents,
In March, our class has embarked on a new adventure. We are now blogging on this new blog. We are using this blog to connect with students all over the world. We are also participating in the Spring 2012, Edublog Student Blogging Challenge.
What is a blog you ask? In short, a blog is type of website that is full of journal articles. (Articles usually involve text, and/or video and photos.) The articles are typically organized in chronological order—meaning the most recent article appears first. Journal articles are referred to as “posts” on a blog. There are millions of blogs on the Internet. They are usually subject related, such as cooking, scrapbooking, baseball, education, photography…you get the idea. After you read a post you can comment on what you read, and carry on a conversation with people all over the world. And that’s just what we are doing.
As a class we are blogging and commenting about all sorts of things, and responding to each of the weekly Edublog challenges. Check out some of our posts below. So far we’ve posted links to our published work on other website such VoiceThread and Glogster. We’ve created our very own avatars and made a slideshow in VoiceThread explaining how and our avatars look the way we do, as a way to introduce ourselves. We’ve even produced a short video on what makes a great blog comment—which you should definitely check out because we want you to visit our blog and start commenting on our posts. And, the students are pretty picky about which comments appear on our blog. So be sure to follow the commenting format.
So here’s what we need you to do–read our posts, including the comments already posted, then respond to one or a few of our posts. Check out the post on “How do you use computers in your job?” and be sure to comment to on it.
Thanks for your support! Please let me know if you have any questions.
Part of week 3’s challenge for the Edublog Student Blogging Challenge is to involve our parents in our Edublog. So here we are asking you, our parents, to please let us know how you use computers in your workplace? What purpose do they serve? What tasks do you use them for? We look forward to reading your comments.
Johnny Appleseed traveled through the midwest planting apple trees
Have you ever wondered who Johnny Appleseed was besides the fact that he planted apple trees? Well I’m here to tell you. Johnny helped settlers on their long journey by giving them apples so they could eat them. He was kind to animals and people. People said that he lived for others.
Johnny was born on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts. When Johnny was two, his father was called into war as a minute man on April 19, 1775. A year later in 1776 he was walking in George Washington’s army. The only one that could comfort Johnny at that time was his six-year-old sister named Elizabeth. At the same time his mother and new born brother died. Luckily Johnny’s dad survived the war and came back home. Then in the summer of 1780 Johnny’s dad got remarried to a woman named Lucy Cooley. After, they had ten more children and Johnny and his sister went to school. But he was often a dreamer in class and never listened. The only reason he liked school is that he could dream about all the animals he would meet in the woods after school and the new adventure he would read in the Bible.
When Johnny was older he worked at a cider mill. Back then they didn’t have refrigerators so they made a lot of products out of apples because they keep fresh for a long time. Most people that worked there threw out the excess seeds. But the Indians and the Bible told him not to waste anything, so he kept the seeds and planted them in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, & Indiana. He planted them just so that other people could eat them. One day he was walking and telling the people around him stories because he was a really good story teller when, he stepped on a rattle snake. The rattle snake bit him and the people around him pointed their guns at it. But he said, “No don’t hurt it! It didn’t know what it was doing.” From then on he wouldn’t wear shoes so that he can punish his feet. He would never kill or eat an animal even if it was already dead. So he became a vegetarian. Sometimes in harsh winters he would live on nuts rather than hunt an animal. Ha carried around a sauce pan to cook with. When he wasn’t cooking he would wear it on his head as a hat.
When Johnny was 71 in 1845 while he was walking in a snowstorm in Fort Wayne, Indiana he caught pneumonia and died. He based his life on others and was always kind and helpful. He made people happy and never let them down. He inspirers me because he became famous just by being himself and people were happy to be in his presents and he was happy to see them as well. He was just an ordinary man with a big heart for others.