We finished our travels in Europe this week! Everyone enjoyed learning about castles, different monuments, and the different cultures within the continent. Something a little different for everyone was coloring on their backs, like Michelangelo did when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We also talked about how several fairy-tales originated in European countries and made a graph to see who would kiss a frog or not. To finish off the week, we tried some French croissants with Italian Nutella! Did you know that Nutella was created by an Italian baker named Pietro Ferrero in the 1940s? His goal was to create a cheaper alternative to chocolate, which, due to World War II, was in short supply. :) 


 Our year is quickly coming to an end!  This week we celebrated Kruz RunningHawk being wonderful, we got to meet his family and tour West Wind Village, we always enjoy that.  We worked witht he sounds of "Th" and "Ch", and in math we are learning to tell time.

 This week first grade worked with words with open and closed syllables (begin, rabbit, etc).  We read a mystery story and worked on making and checking our predictions.  In math we are working with story problems with unknowns.  On Tuesday morning we visited the Courthouse to learn about many different government service workers.  Thanks to Sheriff Dingman for the tour of the Law Enforcement Center and to Nick and Becky Young for arranging the tour.  We enjoyed sitting in on part of the County Commissioner meeting.  On Wednesday we enjoyed the 6th grade vs. senior kickball game.  

 We finished our Math unit on Symmetry, fractions and probability, and we will work on measurement the rest of the school year.  We said good bye for the summer to our reading volunteers Lowell Rohloff and Mary Montonye.  We thanked them for being such dedicated volunteers.  In Science class we have been finding out about changes in states of matter.  We are learning the differences between mixtures and  solutions.


What a busy week! This week we continued to work on fractions in math and even started adding and subtracting fractions with like and unlike denominators. In science we started to wrap up our chapter on "Forms of energy" and prepared for our test. In social studies we are talking about economics and have discussed terms such as budget, buyer, seller, and opportunity cost. We also had a few practices for our spring concert that was held on Thursday night which was beautiful. On Wednesday this week we enjoyed a visit from the seniors and enjoyed watching the kickball game. Also, the third graders are learning how to use the Chromebooks and have had a few lessons to learn about their google email accounts.  

This has been a busy week in 4th grade! We finished our novel unit "Holes". We then watched the movie and compared and contrasted the difference between the book and movie.  We decided the book was better! In science class we made volcanoes and the whole school watched them erupt. It was cool! As a school we came together and prayed the living Rosary. We also had our spring concert and once again the kids and Mrs. Hodgson did not disappoint. It was beautiful!


This week if fifth grade we learned about proportions. We used factor puzzles to solve proportional word problems. We also read a fantasy story called "Weslandia." We examined the theme of the story and related it to a lesson in our life. We had an exciting week with the senior/sixth grade kickball game, it was fun to see the seniors back at St. Mary's School. We also were busy with music practice for Thursday nights concert. Thank you to Mrs. Hodgson for all your hard work again! 

Wow! Where has this school year gone! As I write this, I'm looking at the calendar and realizing that we only have one week left of school. We've finished up our science, spelling, reading, and religion lessons for the year. All that's left for math is something Mr. P. calls "The M&M Lab" to introduce us to probability and a lesson or two about Roman Numerals. He hadn't planned to teach us about Roman Numerals but we begged him to after they showed up in our last chapter and we didn't really know what they meant. He said he'd try to help us with that. But this last week has been crazy... We got to be a part of the Living Rosary and play kickball against the seniors on Wednesday (Mr P told us to tell everybody that we scored 30 runs but that we forgot how many the seniors scored), Thursday night was our spring music concert, and on Friday we erupted our volcanoes in science class. It was so much fun. Next week is going to be a blur too. We finish up stuff in the classroom Monday through Wednesday, we have Baccalaureate Mass on Thursday, Sixth Grade graduation on Thursday night, and "Park Day" for most of Friday. It's going to be fun, but it's going to fly by.