From Kenya to Nashua: Pentominoes

Today, we extended a lesson on pentominoes that I started over the summer in Kenya and at the beginning of the year with this class. We worked with puzzle pieces called pentominoes. See the lesson in Kenya and explanation of pentominoes here. Today we worked with the pentominoes again to measure perimeter and area. You can go here and play with an interactive set of pentominoes.

Classroom Donors Choose Project

The class has certainly enjoyed the two Brian Selznick books "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "Wonderstruck". Since reading the books last fall, different students keep checking out the books to reread them every time we go to the library. I wrote up a Donors Choose project to get 5 classroom copies of each book. You can find the project here. The Nashua Board of Education.is paying for one-half of the project. If you would like to donate any sum, through March 19 your donation will be matched by Donors Choose if you include the the match code BLOOM.

• Spread the word! Send friends and family to http://www.donorschoose.org/newsearles234 and ask them to support our classroom.


• Donors must enter BLOOM during check-out where it says "Match or gift code" - and voila! The donation is automatically doubled. See where donors must enter the code.

The Deerfield Fair

We saw many farm animals at the Deerfield Fair.



We were entertained by the Flying Wallendas



Everyone loved the dogs and monkey.

Friendship Oaths

During Valentine's week, the class read an old Chinese poem called "Shang Ya". It is an Oath of Friendship written 2000 years ago. We used the poem as an inspiration to write our own oaths of friendship. We also used charcoal, water color paints, and markers to create our own style of Chinese art on which to write our poems. Here is an animoto video of the process and finished results.

The New Hampshire State House

Here is an Animoto video of our visit to the State House in Concord. Unfortunately my class was broken up into two groups so that I only got photos of some of my students.