Mrs. Carlston's class: This year students will be completing a "Progress Portfolio" of their goals and learning in each academic area of the curriculum as well as charting their behavior. The students will be able to see graphically how they are doing as they proceed through the school year. This project will not only help them create their own progress charts and graphs, but will help them analyze their accomplishments using range, mode, median, and mean from test scores for each subject. We will share these portfolios with parents at conference times.

A past project that is still being used as a teaching tool is the roller coaster students made for the University of Utah Engineering Week. They did not win the roller coaster drawing, but teams from our class took second place in the tower-building contest and the human roller coaster contest. Students this year will also be learning about energy and Newton's Laws of Motion thanks to the roller coaster project.

Here's our class roller coaster. We hope to be able to keep it at Arcadia and continue to use it for science.

Reading/Language Arts: Students will begin TWO year-long projects. They are writing five-chapter books on their lives which will include a chapter on a learning experience and chapters on other important events in their lives. Also they will research one of the states in the United States and present Power Point projects on the states before the end of the school year. This project will integrate their language arts and social studies curriculum. "Team reading" will also enhance this integration. Four teams in my class will be reading books relating to four different periods of U.S. history.

Math: Our class will do a hands-on study of measurement. Students will discover how important it is to be accurate as they measure lines to the nearest 1/8 inch. We will measure perimeter and area and will be working on capacity (volume) soon. In relation to measuring dimensions and because Eienstein is our class mentor, we study his life and ideas about our four dimensional world (three spacial dimensions and one time dimension). We'll make hypercubes which represent the fourth dimension. Also during the schoool year, we will read "A Wrinkle in Time," which is a science fiction story that explores the possibility of a fifth dimension.

Social Studies: Students will work on map skills, and after making sure that everyone knows the seven continents, we will focus on North America, specifically the United States. We will work on our state research and our Power Point projects and will study the history of the U.S., beginning with the explorers and colonization as well as the Revolutionary War and progressing to the present time.

Science: Students will study process skills which relate to scientific method. We will learn how scientists observe and measure, make hypothesis, experiment, retest, and draw conclusions. We especially like the experiments! Students may do extra credit experiments at any time throughout the school year. Just clear a presentation time! Students will begin by studying Earth Science, and all year we will be getting ready for our Science Fair in March. Other units of study are Magnatism and Electricity, Matter, and Heredity.

Health: We will study the three parts of health: physical, empotional/intellectual, and social. We will be writing goals for each of these aspects of health and trying to accomplish them by the end of the school year.