Today, students got a chance to try out different instruments to help them make their selections for next year.  The fifth graders did a great job of showing our kids how to make some music – or just noise to start…!

Students took some notes while they were trying out the different instruments. Please go over this with your child and choose your top 3 choices.

The Shanghai Youth String Quartet (with 12th graders Leo & Levin Zhu, 11th grader Julia Deng, & 10th grader Alex Yang) will give their final Farewell & Summer Charity Concert on Friday, June 1, 2012 at the Function Room of the Green Court Phase 1 Club House.

Last December, this same group did a fantastic job at their previous recital, and this time promises to be even better!

Thank you, 4th grade parents and SAS parent community, for putting on such an amazing teacher appreciation week.

Breakfast and lunch were both spectacular and the staff could not stop talking about how much we enjoyed everything!

All of our students showed good sportsmanship and did a great job at our SAS Track and Field Event a couple of weeks ago.  In addition, ribbons were awarded to the top 8 students in each category.

Special congratulations go to our Sarah for setting the Gr.4 Javelin Throw record!

Click on the links below to see records and results.

4th & 5th Grade Final Results

ES Track & Records (2012 Updated)

Check out these other cool science activities that demonstrate surface tension!

Thanks to Mr Hagen for sharing these with us!

Matchstick Speedboats

Runaway Pepper

Toilet Paper and Needle

Milk & Food Coloring (Mr Hagen’s favorite)

Walking Paperclips

May 25th -Last day for student and parent check out

May 31st- All student and parent library materials due back in the library

*Parents and students can check to see what they have checked out by logging into their Destiny account.  Instructions are located on the library blog.

http://teachers.saschina.org/espudonglibrary/book-search-in-destiny/

If something has gone missing, please contact Mrs. Boyer.  :)

Can you believe there’s only 4 more weeks of school?  Time sure is ticking by and we are making the most out of every moment!

This week…we had special guest speaker, Mr John Uhran (Sarah’s dad), come in to share with us what his company does and how it is connected to the big picture of trade and society.  We sure learned a lot about Lubrizol – what they do and how they are organized (ask your child to show you the web map they made after the presentation).  Daniel Ra even got to be the lucky lab assistant who helped with a gel-making demo!  Thanks to Mr Uhran for his time and effort in preparing a fantastic presentation – it was awesome!

To end the week, we enjoyed a concert band performance by the 5th graders.  They sounded great and I bet all your kids are now thinking about which instrument they would like to play next year…

Classroom Updates

Readers Workshop

This week book clubs met to discuss their books, trying to talk ‘long & strong’ by pushing their conversations deeper.  We also learned to make connections to our personal lives, what we’ve seen in real life, as well as to other texts as we look at how different authors portray the same social issue differently.

Writer’s Workshop

We started our research unit and started applying our Big6 Research Skills to our areas of interest.  Drawing parallels to the structure of essays, students decided on their topic, subtopics, and questions that would help them find what the information they need.  We’re using an upsized version of the essay folders to record our information.

Social Studies

Students wrapped up this unit with an independent project that showed their understanding of the central ideas and key benchmarks.  Students were free to choose whatever form they wished, but are all being graded by a rubric that the class came up with.  We had a couple of presentations today, and the rest of us will be finishing up our projects over the weekend to present to the class on Monday.

Science

In science, we started our new unit on water and focused on looking at the properties of water.  Some concepts from our investigations:

- water is transparent and shapeless

- water can be absorbed or it can bead up depending on the surface

- water has surface tension; the surface tension can be weakened with salt and liquid detergent

Yearbooks are selling like hotcakes!
To avoid disappointment, we would like to stress that we only are selling 300 Yearbooks. Once this figure is reached, Yearbook sales will close.
Be sure to bring your yearbook forms back asap!

If you did not receive a yearbook form, you are able to pay directly to the cashier.