This past Wednesday, we celebrated our SuperKids winners before heading home for Christmas break. Our winners were treated to a big screen movie showing of "Horton Hears a Who" and having a snack. Our winners for the month of December were: Courtney, Easton, JZ, Ashley, Mikeala, Andrew, Justin, Taryn, and Xan. Congratulations everyone! Keep up the fantastic work. You and your other classmates regardless of the award or not are truely SUPERKIDS!
Our 5th graders celebrated their third SuperKids reward party of the year last week. Those who earned the title of "SuperKids" for October, had the opportunity to spend the morning playing board, cards, and trivia games. Some students brought their favorite board game from home to share. Everyone had a good time! Congratulations to the October SuperKids from Mr. Boyer's class: Justin, Cortney, Isaac, Mikaela, Taryn, Ashley, JZ, and Tiffany.
Our classroom has been visited by some new guests this week, a small group of "Prickly Pickles." These creatures have come looking for the cleanest tables in the classroom. When students leave for the day, they Pickles perch themselves high above those tables that they feel are the cleanest at the end of the day. If they are undecided as to which table to choose, they then look at each students' mailboxes and cubbies to make their decisions. Upon their return the next day, students recieve a classroom ticket if their team was
one that was chosen.
We've been into science for two weeks now and have already seen some amazing things and made some great discoveries through demonstrations and investigations. Our science experiment for the week was to see how carefully we could follow directions while doing a lab activity. This activity took team work on everyone's part to complete the task. We experimented with different colors 
of water and learned how to use and read measurements on pippettes. It was a great activity and both classes (Boyer and Rorabaugh) did a fantastic job of working together, encouraging each other, and being very careful with their materials. We hope that we can do a lot of these neat experiments and investigations as the year goes along.http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=390ba92fcf89374efead
Our 5th grade theme this year is Superheroes. Our classroom motto is "Be Someone's Hero". Heroes are looked up to and admired by many people. They always try to do what's right, even though there are some challenges or some tough decisions that might be put in front of them. Little kids especially like superheroes. We are now the oldest and biggest students in the school and so we have to show and model for the younger students good behavior and decision making at Heusner. Being a hero doesn't always mean saving the day, sometimes it means that you just do what's right and what's good not only for yourself, but for others as well.
A new year always brings me a new group of minds to shape and expand and I love seeing all the bright faces as they come in for the first day of school. We will be having a student teacher with us for the first part of the year. His name is Mr. Walters and he is from Arizona.
After the performance, we all went to the park to eat our lunches. It was a beautiful day out with the sun shining and the wind held off long enough for us to enjoy the great outdoors for a day. This Friday, a select group of 5th graders will show off their ballroom dancing skills at the Steifel Theatre for a Salina Concert in front of the whole community. All students worked very hard and did a wonderful job during their performance today. They made Heusner Elementary and all of it's teachers and parents very proud. What a great group of 5th graders!
You can see more pictures by going to http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/359714.4d6f2e1e41a
Last week, Mr. Boyer's math class took part in a nationwide internet project called the Great Egg Roll. Our task was to roll a 2" plastic egg and then measure to see how far it went in feet and inches. After getting everyone's calculations, we then converted our results to only inches and we had to remember that 1 foot is equal to 12 inches. Our final task was to find the mean number of inches of the whole class.
For the past two months, our reading group has been collecting the Freedom Dollars from the local newspaper, Salina Journal. The dollars are in part of a story through the paper about the Underground Railroad and who can collect the most dollars through their own "network". Today was the day we turned all of ours in. We turned in a whopping total of 22,693 Freedom Dollars. Mrs. Karlin's brother-in-law (who has been recovering from surgery) spent his recovery time cutting out and collecting for our class. Through his friends at the recycling center, he was able to get several papers to cut from. He brought our class 11,508 from his cutting. Mr. Boyer's OSCAR class is indebted to Mr. who became a member of our Freedom Dollar network and hopefully helped us gather enough to win. To show our gratitude, we gave him a brand new pair of gold plated scissors (since his are probably dull after all that cutting)
Heusner has routinely been noted about all of it's wonderful teachers on staff. So, when a teacher gets publically recognized, it makes us all beam with pride. Mr. Boyer's 5th grade class would like to hand out their congratulations to 4th grade teacher, Mr. Michel. He was awarded the Kansas Horizon Teaching Award, which is given to only a select few 1st year teachers in the state.
polymers and elasticity. Our main purpose for conducting the experiment was so that we good practice using the steps of the Scientific Method. Our task was to see which was more elastic a Ziploc baggie or a plactic Dixie Cup. After creating our hypothesis about what would happen, we made some startling discoveries. Some students decided to take it a step further and ask 
themselves, "What would happen if..." Our imaginations went wild. We were again amazed at some of our discoveries. And we learned that some times in Science, things don't always happen like we think they 
should.
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families.
