What's Up in Gym Class by Mason

Gym at Knollwood is really fun but it is also extremely different from other classes because you use your body and you get to run.

At gym, the gym teacher, Mr. Lydon, knows a lot of fun games, and even if it's an ordinary game like tag, he knows a really fun way to play it. One of the best games is Capture the Flag, which is the first game we learned.

How you play Capture the Flag is there are two teams and two sides. When the game starts, you try to run or you can try to tag people who are on your side but on the other team. If you run, you have to try to grab a "flag" which could be anything to represent it. If you grab a flag from the box, you are safe, but when you leave the box, you have to run to your side. If you get tagged, you have to go to jail.

When you go to jail, you have to wait for someone on your team to rescue you by running across to the jail without getting tagged.

Gym, in my opinion, is the best subject because you get to run around and have a lot of fun.

Fun Art by Michael

When Mr. Z showed us the Jackson Pollock project, we all got excited. We thought it was splatter paint, but we would put the paint down and blow it with a straw. And at the end of the day, Mr. Z showed us jacksonpollock.org. It was really cool. I even go to it when I get bored. You can visit it at: jacksonpollock.org.

Invention Convention by Rodrigo

In room 101, 24 students have started to ask people problems they have to help them get ideas for Invention Convention.

Students have started brainstorming inventions. Lots of people have good ideas. A lot of people are excited for Invention Convention.

On April 18, 24 students will have inventions to share.

Fantasy Fun by Alex

Us kids in Room 101 do writing celebrations like last week when we just finished fantasy and we had a celebration. It was really fun to read other kids' stories and learn a lot of new things. Some of the things we learned were how to write in third person and how to use dialogue, paragraphs, tiny actions, and punctuation.

In the video above, Alex shares some photos of parts of our published fantasy pieces and names the writing work that she sees in that part of the piece.

Vocabulary by Arabella

In writing, we have these special words like grit and charred and lots of others. We have hand motions for the words. We have lots of different hand motions. We get a lot of new words and when Mrs. Mills or Mrs. Barnett don't know hand motions for the word, it's up to the students to come up with them, which happens a lot. A student came up with the hand motion for grit. 

Sometimes we play this game for the words during snack where someone does the motion and people guess what the word is that goes with that motion. The student doing it for the class calls on a person who knows the answer. This game is really fun. We get to play it a lot.

If you want to see some of the words, watch my video. There will be two people in the video with me. We are going to say the word and do the motion. We're going to say the word first and then do the motion and describe the word. So please watch the video :)!

Note from the teachers: in the video above, Arabella, Allie, and Alex demonstrate the motions for some of our vocabulary words.

Stock Market Club by Wyatt

Every Wednesday at recess I have Stock Market Club. We usually have Stock Market Club in the computer lab, but sometimes it's in Mrs. Dougherty's room. Mrs. Dougherty runs Stock Market Club.

The first thing we do in Stock Market Club is make our group. You can choose to be with anyone. Then you start to buy stocks. Stocks are companies like McDonald's, Disney, and UPS. After you pick your stocks, you try to win.

If you're in first or second place, you get to go to a lunch. At the end of Stock Market Club we get a pizza party. I think that's fun. So anytime you see a Stock Market Club or game, you should try them out.

Here's the website we use during Stock Market Club: http://www.stockmarketgame.com.