Celebration of Learning

Hey Everyone!

It has been a crazy week with a capital Z! We worked feverishly on our book all the way up to the very last minute on Thursday. Thanks to Ms. Sherie's coupons we were able to print several fabulous copies. Yesterday we took some time from our work to visit Ana Dodgen at the WSU planetarium. She showed up how use how the night sky rotates from East to West like the Sun and Moon. We even got her to tell us about a few famous constellations. On friday we got everything done, finished building our Galileoscopes for the Palouse Discovery Science Center, completed our imaginary planet writing project, and even had time to throw a wild Friday night Celebration of Learning to wrap up our expedition.
-Mr. Ellsworth

MOVING INTO 2nd SEMESTER

This week in the 3/4 Crew one of the things that happened was Ana Dodgen, our came to teach us about craters and how they are formed. Also we drew pictures of the solar system with labels and lots of detail. Today we helped the kindergartners get ready for their first student led conferences. We look forward to an upcoming field work at the WSU planetarium.
-Lena and Emma 3/4 Crew




This has seen some great changes in our daily schedule. We moved our Math block to the morning which seems to give the kids a little extra concentration. After math we now hold our morning meetings. Gabe was our morning meeting leader and really did a good job this week. I was also very impressed by how Frances and John took charge of P.E. as our P.E. leaders. We have been working on our transitions this week, and we are getting ready for the final push in our expedition before friday's Celebration of Learning. Remember parents that achievement reports come out this tuesday.
Mr. Ellsworth 3/4 Crew

Our 3-4 Crew has been doing an expedition on the solar system, and an expert astronomer came in yesterday and talked with us about the Moon and eclipses. We also all hopefully enjoyed our Community Led Learning which started this week. Hopefully we all got our 1-3 choices. We have also been working really hard on our our portfolios and most of us have finished them. Our crew set up the room, cleaned the room, and some people made a new CREW poster for parent night.
-Elizabeth and Taylor D. 3/4 CREW


This week I, Mr. Ellsworth, got the chance to travel to Kansas City for a training on effective and high quality expeditions. It was really exciting because I got to meet the legendary Steven Leavy. The first day was spent looking at an expedition on human rights, and the trainers used the Rwanda Genocide as the teaching vehicle. The second day was a walk through the planning templates, difference between projects and products, and we got an opportunity to examine high quality products from around the country. On the last day, we got an opportunity to work on our upcoming expedition plans, conference with experts, collaborate with teachers from other states. Outside of the sub-zero temperatures, it was an amazing training.
-Mr. Ellsworth 3/4 Crew Leader

This week as 3/4 crew we went ice skating and we made a portfolio for student led conferences. 3/4 crew also made Galileoscopes with Stephanie from the Pullman Science Center. We also went through our expedition journals and generated a question to write a paragraph for our book.
-Anna PPSEL 3rd Grade



This was an event packed week! Stephanie from the Pullman Science Center came in and helped us build Galileoscopes. She left our telescopes to finish next week. They were very fun to make. We aslo wrote questions about the solar system and answered them using what we know. We knew a lot, so most of the answers were long. Then the whole school went ice skating in the middle of the day! Many of the kids did not know how to skate, but other kids that did helped them or even taught them how. When we first got the rink, only 68% of the kids knew how to skate, but by the end about 98% could. PPSEL definitely represented CREW at the rink! If that isn't enough, we also made our portfolios this week, and they were really nice.
-Jonna PPSEL 3rd Grade