Thank You, Mr. Dombrowski!

We can't believe that our time with Mr. Dombrowski is up.
We wish you the best of luck in your teaching career, Mr. Dombrowski!

Our Personal Space Expert

At the end of our immersion stage, we still had lots of lingering questions. Fortunately, Max's dad is our resident space expert.  We emailed him our questions:

Max's dad came in right before break to help answer these questions. He even brought things lioke shuttle models, real meteors, and replicated Mars dust for us to explore!

He prepared a PowerPoint to share pictures and explain answers to our questions.

He even gave us each a dime and had us focus on the eye of Roosevelt.  He said that scientists took a picture in the sky that was only the size of Roosevelt's eye on the dime, and they were able to see lots of additional galaxies in just that tiny speck of a picture. Wow!

He shared different types of meteors with us...

 ...as well as replicated Mars dust.

 He even had an old piece of the exterior shuttle material that we could actually touch!

Thank you for your dad's expertise and time, Max! 

Humane Society Donations

Instead of exchanging gifts during the holidays, Hillcrest & LEADS 1st graders have chosen to make donations to our local humane society. 

We were able to get a visit from some thankful pets and members of the Humane Society.

We learned about ways to be safe around pets and read dogs' body language.

We even got to see a special dog and cat!

At the end, we each got a chance to pet the animals.

Thank you to all of our Hillcrest & LEADS families who donated items!

Germs!

Our school nurse, Ms. Demerath, came to give us a talk on handwashing today.

We learned how to be Germ Stoppers and saw a video about handwashing.

We got squirted with "germs" and talked about proper handwashing techniques...

...and we got to see how many "germs" we had on our hands under a black light.

We did our best to wash our hands thoroughly...

...and checked our handwashing skills by looking under the black light again!

It was tricky to make sure we got all the "germs!"

Brain Study

Forrest had to go to the doctor and they took pictures of his brain!  We were super-excited to be able to observe the pictures.
Mrs. Going heard about it and Forrest was able to share them with her, too!

Veterans Day

Room 408 did a mini-inquiry about Veterans Day.

We made observations and inferred about photographs:

We read magazines to get information:

We watched videos and during our research we made sure to write down our findings:

We were amazed at everything we learned about Veterans Day!

To top off our inquiry, we had a special guest come in...Bennett's dad!

He answered a lot of our lingering questions.

He was a medic in the Army.

He showed us a lot of the medical equipment that he had on hand.

His strong medical scissors could cut a dime in half!

He showed us the medals and pins that he earned.

We are so thankful that our military is so strong and brave!