Lowell Mills

This week, the fourth grade had the opportunity to travel to Lowell Mills for their program on immigration.  It was a wonderful field trip and we learned a lot about different immigrant groups, the reasons they came to the United States, hardships they faced and how they contributed to the culture of our country.

We began with a tour of the mills which still function to this day.

Only about 10 machines were working but it was still fairly noisy.  At their height, the mills had over 200 machines in operation!

After our tour, we began learning about the different immigrant groups that came to Lowell.

Each one of us was given a passport of an immigrant which explained their story.  We were told we would have to remember this information to answer three questions when we went through an "immigration check point."

  After the check point, the class was broken up by their country of origin.  Each group then had either a suitcase, trunk or crate that they unpacked, filled with items that were important to immigrants of their group.

Each group set out their objects for everyone to see and read about their items in an enclosed binder.

After each group visited the other groups, we came together as a class and talked about similarities we saw.  We learned that these are called "cultural universals" and include things like music, religion, food, clothing and toys.

We then went to lunch and after attended a mock town meeting.  The subject of he meeting was whether or not tax money from the City of Lowell should be used to build a school for Irish immigrants' children.

Each student was given a character to play and a costume.

Four of our classmates served as important town officials!

At the end of the town meeting, each "character" voted and the school was approved!  However, we then remembered that this town meeting (which actually occurred in Lowell) happened before women were given the right to vote.  Our guide then showed us that without the women's vote, the school would not be passed and funded.

After our town meeting, we headed over to one of the boarding houses where the mill girls lived.  We were shocked to see how different our lives are compared to theirs.

A big thank you to TESPO for funding this field trip.  It was great fun and we learned a lot!

Change Is Simple

  Our class was lucky enough to have another visit from Change Is Simple this week.  We focused on endangered animals, learning about different species' habitats, food sources and more.  We also got to play a fun game having to do with resources disappearing from our planet.  Enjoy the video!

Techsplorations

On Thursday, the 4th grade was lucky enough to be visited by Mr. Wahle, an expert in electricity and magnetism.  He started the day with the entire 4th grade, talking to us about how electricity is generated and even showing us his Tesla coil!

After lunch, our class headed up to the art room to have some time exploring circuits.  We learned how to wire a circuit with a switch, light bulb, even a doorbell.

Thank you to TESPTO for sponsoring this wonderful program!

Change Is Simple

This post was written by Asha and Bea about an enrichment activity our class experienced last week.  Thank you to the two of them for an amazing job!
Today, our class went to the library for a program called Change Is Simple.  When we first got there they told us, "today we are going to learn about trash and the three R's: reduce, reuse and recycle."
After some talking about the meaning for trash and keeping our community trash free, Dom (one of the helpers from the program) told us we were going to learn a fun way to sort our trash, with a relay race!  Then he sorted us into five groups and dumped a pile of trash in front of each group.  

In the first round, we had 3 bins: trash, recycling and paper bins.  But in the second round we were going to get some more.  In the first round the 5th group won but put something in the wrong bin.  It was a plastic toy they put in recycling, but surprisingly it was trash because it had more than one kind of plastic.  In the second rounds we got a few more bins: the reduce bin, the reuse bin and the compost bin.  Those new three were so you could not have anything in the trash bin.  The 5th group won again but had a few wrong things like one item in the trash.  After that second round it was time to move on.

The next thing Dom told us to do was stand in a circle.  Once we got into a circle he asked us if we liked snakes.  Most said yes but there were some no's.  Then he reached in the sack he was holding and pulled out an empty water bottle then handed it to someone and kept walking and more came out!  Every one that came out he handed to someone.  Some people even got two!  They were held together by string, so he called it a "water bottle snake."  He asked us to guess how many bottles we thought were in it.  After lots of guesses, we dialed it down to less than 230 but more than 210.  The final guess was 220 which we thought was right but the actual answer was 228.  He asked us what we thought that number stood for.  Turned out it was the number of plastic bottles the average American uses each year.

We thought he was done but he had more!  He split us into 6 groups of 6 and said we were going to find Proctor's average.  First, we did the average for our class and Mrs. Gibbas's class (they were with us), then we did that for the other two classes in the 4th grade.  Then we found the average for each grade and finally found our answer for the whole school.  The final average was 49,248 water bottles per year!  A lot, right?!

Simple Machines Project

As a culminating project for our unit on simple machines, our class used our knowledge to create gumball machines out of found materials. Every machine needed to include an inclined plane, pulley, lever, wheel and axel, and a working set of gears. The groups worked well together and enjoyed this foray into the design and engineering process!