News from Mrs. Kajikawa's Fifth Graders

Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska. We are a class of fifth graders in Anchorage, Alaska. Our school year began on August 31 with a class of 28 students (11 boys and 17 girls). This year my goal is to post our weekly newsletter on the internet.You can view it using Acrobat Reader, and can down load it free from the following web site: http://cgi.netscape.com/cgi-bin/plug-in_finder.cgi?application/pdf
This will be updated every Friday and the old newsletter will be placed in our archive file. We hope you enjoy following our activities throughout the year.

Our classroom is fortunate to have a total of 7 computers. We use these computers to practice keyboarding skills, create projects, write e-mail, create Hyperstudio stacks, and check internet for current events. One of our first computer projects was to create a slide show bookreport using ClarisWorks. In late fall, our class surveyed each grade level, to determine how some of the school hot lunches ranked with the students. We then created spreadsheets and constructed graphs that showed the popularity of each lunch. These pie graphs were placed on the bulletin board by the lunchroom for everyone to enjoy. Our latest computer project is a Hyperstudio stack the students are creating to go with their famous person research. We hope to have some of these projects linked to our homepage soon. We have received many email messages requesting penpals and epals from around the world and the US. We have responded to several and recently sent written messages to a class in Texas. Many people are interested in our current weather conditions. We have had very cold (-10 degrees F) temperatures but the temperatures for late January call for a warming trend that will take us into the teens. Those temperatures are very comfortable for us.

Once again this year, our major internet project will be participation in 'Owney, the Traveling Dog' project. Last year there were schools participating from more than 35 states. This year we hope to have all 50 states participating. However, due to the size of the group, there will be 2 stuffed animals involved. We will be close to the end of the chain this time and look forward to receiving Owney in April. At this time, we have receive postcards from almost half of the fifty states. We have received at least one postcard a week and we are adding them to our Owney map of the US as they arrive. We are scheduled to receive Owney sometime in April.

 

This is Owney - dressed up in an outfit with pins he has been collecting from the states he's visited. This picture was sent to us in December.
   Owney is a stuffed animal that represents Owney the stray dog that became a well known mail train mascot in the 1800's. Last September, he came to Anchorage from Mrs. Carter's class in Key Largo, Florida. The students entertained him at their tables, and he went to their music class, and visited the library during their library period. Several students took him home for the evening.
We sent postcards to the other participating states to tell them about Owney's visit and shared weather information. As Owney mades his way around the country, every school that participated sent a postcard to all the schools in the project. A large map of the US was set up with the heading, 'Where in the US is Owney?' We placed the name of the city and state on our wall map as we received email that Owney made his way to that state.

 

 
This is the sign put up for our Wetlands project by Mr. LaForest, a Bayshore parent. A Boy Scout group put in the flower box and planted the flowers. The students enjoyed collecting invertebrate specimens at the pond in the fall. We hope to go on a pond walk next Spring when the boardwalk around the pond is fixed.

Bayshore Pond was a study site for our Wetlands unit last year and we hope to continue this project this year. We went dipnetting and collected our own invertebrates from the pond. We used a microprojector and microscopes to study them and their movements were fascinating. Check our Wetlands Grant page for more information on our pond study. Mr. Oliver, a parent and a Gifted Ed. teacher provided wonderful photos of invertebrates, insects, birds, and other animal life that are found in this habitat and these were placed on our interpretive sign. CR Services donated the structure and the scouts from our class stained the wood. This summer, a flower garden was put up by a Scout group under the supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Booker.

   
Dee Dee Jonrowe visited our school on February 10 and brought one of her retired sled dogs with her. Her presentation covered the importance of dogs to Alaskans as well as beautiful slides of her Iditarod Race. Dee Dee has competed in 21 Iditarod Races, and she has placed in the top 10 in many of them. We hope this will be her year. Visit her web page and learn more about her team for this year

 

Sonja from our class was in a Nutcracker in December. She's in one in the red outfit. Doesn't she look wonderful?

Many students in our class are currently working with primary teachers in creating webpages for those classrooms. We hope to add those to our school homepage soon. Several students are also planning to turn their Hyperstudio stacks on famous people into webpages and we will create links to those projects in the neaar future. Keep checking back for our updates.
We hope you write to our class at the address below and share something about your state or country.

updated: February, 2000

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