Happy 40th Birthday OCS!

This past week the elementary school had a blast celebrating the 40th birthday of our school. Each class decorated their classroom door. Here's ours:


As you can see, our faces were the "flames" on our candles. Cute, huh?



We created cheers for a special assembly and enjoyed hearing from the very first OCS headmaster, Mr. High during chapel. But, perhaps our favorite activity was dressing in 70's apparel. We had fun with this!







Don't we just look so cool........ Love, peace, and flower power!


The best part about all this was that we fourth grade teachers could all REALLY remember these days and we enjoyed the memories (or, at least, most of them :))

50's Day

Today was 50's Day at OCS. Why? Our very own Ms. Claire Johnson was "Principal for the Day" and she decreed that it should be a day of rock and roll! We gladly dusted off our poodle skirts, and found our leather jackets, bobby socks, and cuffed jeans for the occasion. We crunched on Necco candy and "looped handled" lollipops as we listened to favorite songs from days gone by. Ms. Johnson was accompanied by vice principal Ms. Berry. They even summoned a few of our students into the office for "detention" which included doing push ups!!! The consensus was that this was definitely a fun way to end the quarter and prepare for a long anticipated Spring Break!

Mad Scientists and Inclined Planes

The mad scientists have been at work again! This time we experimented with incline planes. Each team took a cardboard ramp that rested against a stack of 4 books. A toy car was tied to twine and placed at the bottom of the ramp. The twine went up the ramp and over the edge to hang below the table. Tied to the other end of the twine was an empty plastic cup. We began filling the cup with pennies and recorded how many pennies it took to move the car up and over the ramp. After this, we added 4 more books to the stack and did the same experiment again. We learned that the steeper the incline, the more force was needed to move an object.

Fruit Loop Math

This week we are taking time to concentrate on word problems. Using our Fruit Loops, we created problems for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We discussed the key words and terms that are used as "signals" for one of the four operations. Next, we enjoyed eating our yummy cereal while we actually solved word problems on paper. Bon Appetite!

Constitutuion Jeopardy

Who doesn't like to play Jeopardy? We enjoyed a game with two teams as reviewed details surrounding The Constitution. This proved to be a beneficial and fun way to review for our test.

Why the Constitution?

Our social studies focus the past several weeks has been on the formation of our nation, specifically after the Revolutionary War. We learned that the Articles of Confederation was not the best solution because this document did not provide power to the government. Men with great wisdom and fortitude decided to write a more comprehensive document instead. For four very sultry summer months James Madison, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and many other delegates worked to produce The Constitution.

Bailey's tree

Riley's design

Next we learned how the Constitution lays out the three branches of government. We designed these trees to illustrate the branches and how they are divided.