Today was a bridge building experience.  We continued our bridge building companies and some of us started building our bridges.  Others worked on their bridge plans.  We have only three more weeks to complete our bridges but we will be dogmatic about finishing them.  Our class is excited to see how the bridges will turn out.  Before our companies built bridges, all of us participated in our Vocabulary Cartoon card jeopardy.  The vocabulary quiz was easy because everyone studied and made an A on it.  Last week's vocabulary words were embark and splice.  Did you figure them out?  Our Above and Beyond projects were presented after the quiz.  They were about the Olympics, Great Barrier Reef animals and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.  There are only three more weeks to present your two Above and Beyond projects.  Because today was a short Target day, we went to Weighty Words right after recess.  Today was a very exciting day.

We finally started our bridge companies.  Finding out our careers was the first step.  Then the people who had each job had a mini-conference with Mrs. Lyjak to figure out how to do the occupations we were assigned to.  Our company names were the Best Brand Bridges (BBB), Bridge Buddies, Monster Bridges, and Makm jb Bridges, Inc.  Some of us were able to start buying supplies and others were still trying to figure out their logos and architectural plans.  We will need to splice toothpicks together to create our bridges.  We will continue making our bridges and buying supplies next week.  After that we presented and listened to Above and Beyond projects about superstitions, the Hawaiian islands, skateboards, soft-coated wheaten terrier, Studio Ghibli, and Australian animals.  We have hidden our vocabulary words this week in our blog.  Can you find them?  Today we embarked on a bridge building adventure in Target.

Today was an interesting day because we started our big semester project.  We will be building bridges using toothpicks. string, and glue.  Each of us applied for a job in a bridge-building company.  There will be five different jobs in each company.  The jobs are transportation chief, the accountant, the architect, the CEO and the carpenter.  In order to apply for these jobs we needed to write a resume and get a job reference from another classmate.  Lucky for us, everyone in Target is literate.  This project is very hard so inept people could not accomplish this.  We think this will be a very fun but challenging project.  This week we had three Above and Beyond projects.  They were about the Eiffel Tower, the U.S. Mint and Pointe Shoes.  We also completed vocabulary cartoon cards for two words.  Can you find them in our blog?  Last week's words were shamble and quack.  After finishing vocabulary cartoons, we checked our Building Big: Bridges work.  Most of us ended our day with Hands On Equations.  So that was our fabulous Target Day.  

We had a dazzling Target day.  No one was a quack, thank goodness!  As always we started with Vocabulary Cartoon cards.  That reminds us, did you guess last week's words?  They were "abound" and "zeal".  Can you guess this week's words?  Next we looked at all the postcards that people brought in the last two weeks and put their locations on our postcard world map.  We had postcards from Florida, San Francisco, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sweden, Germany, Nova Scotia, the Netherlands, New York, Texas, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and Missouri.  Please keep bringing them in.  Next we worked on our Building Big packet which is due next week.  If you didn't finish it today, then you need to finish it by next week.  After that we figured out that a cylinder is the strongest shape for a pier by putting paperback books on three different shapes of paper piers.  The other shapes we tried were triangular piers and square piers.  They both became shambles of crumbled paper.  Finally we learned algebraic skills in Hands On Equations.  After Hands On Equations we cleaned up so our room was not in shambles anymore.   As you can see, we had a great day.

Today we had a fantastic day.  We had zeal for many of our activities.  We hid our vocabulary words in our last blog.  Did you find them?  They were fetch and prototype.  This week's words are once again hidden in our blog.  Next we learned about our strengths and weaknesses when we completed our team work rubrics.  We completed one on ourselves and one on our partners.  Our partners needed to be someone we had worked with before so we knew their work habits.  Then we wrote paragraphs about what we learned about ourselves.  We are still trying to finish our Building Big internet scavenger hunt.  Next we worked on Hands On Equations because we did not do it last week.  Then we went to Mrs. Lind's trailer for Weighty Words.    Once we were finished reading the story we created a cartoon about the word coruscate.  We had an abounding amount of fun.  All of our work at Target today was dazzling.

Today in Target there were Above and Beyond projects galore.  They were about football, oil, Australian animals, vampires, earthquakes, roller coasters, bonsai trees, Appalachian trail, Eisenhower, Winnie the Pooh, Annie, and Sigismund III.  Next time, please don't wait to the last day to present your projects.  We fetched information for our Building Big Bridges computer scavenger hunt.  We learned some of the prototypes of bridges today.  Our class started a new unit and learned new vocabulary and have hidden it in our blog.  Can you find them?  Today all of us watched a video called Understanding Bridges.  Then we created a study guide from what we learned on the video.  So, as you can see, there was the best possible day ever in Target.  

Today Mrs. Lyjak was back after sitting in bed for a week.  It was colossal news that Mrs. Lyjak was back.  We started off the day with vocabulary cartoons.  Can you guess them?  Last weeks words were underdog and retrieve.  Then everything got mixed up when we went back to our class until after recess because Mrs. Lyjak was proctoring a test.  It was like putting a parapet in our Target day.  After that we had five awesome Above and Beyond presentations.  They were on horse body parts, strange fruits, rocks, rat terriers and the White House.  We talked about the Reflections contest and the Bridge postcard contest.  This year the Reflections contest is about Beauty.  We are competing against another Target class in a different school for who can get the most different bridge postcards.  Help us to get as many postcards as we can.  Next we used our mathematical minds to solve our Hands On Equations.  We hope you liked our colossal Target Day.  

Today we built a bridge to learning with our substitute teacher.  First we retrieved our Vocabulary Cartoon books and created our cards.  We have hidden our words in this blog.  Can you find them?  After this we retrieved the laptops and worked on a Building Big Bridge Basics worksheet.  We had to retrieve information from all over the web site.  Did you know that the Brooklyn Bridge is an underdog compared to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which is 89,760 feet long?  Finally, two people presented Above and Beyond projects about dragons and Harry Potter mystical creatures.  We all hope that Mrs. Lyjak will feel better and we will have a great day next week.

Remember to bring your binder, signed Target Tally and a big happy bridge-loving smile.

We had a wonderful, super-fantastic day at Target.  Today we switched things up a bit and went to Mrs. Lind's trailer to do Weighty Words.  We learned abasement.  Abasement is to get degraded or demoted.  We also introduced ourselves to Mrs. Lind by saying our names and giving a word to describe us.  One person presented an Above and Beyond.  It was about "the snack that smiled back" or goldfish.  Goldfish are acclaimed because they are tasty.  Each of us got a plateful of extreme cheddar goldfish.  Goldfish were introduced in 1962 from Switzerland.  We played a vocabulary matching game using bridge vocabulary.  We learned that compression is squeezing together and tension is pulling away.  Tension and compression are important to bridges because they make the bridge stable.  Last week's vocabulary words were catamaran and passive.  Did you guess them?   Target is innately full of learning and fun!

Would you like to take the bridge over the rainbow to see what we did in Target today?  Everyone enjoyed the Bridge Simulation.  It was a game that involved trading, bridges, and survival.  We had different towns and each town had one kind of resource such as machines, knowledge, tools, food, children and water.  First we traded our resources to survive then some bridges were built and we found that trading was easier when we had bridges.  Then a "hurricane" struck and the bridges collapsed.   Then the tax lady came and took some of our resources to build new, shorter bridges.  If only one of our resources was a catamaran, our lives would be easier.  At the end of the simulation, seven people died due to dehydration and starvation.   We learned that life is a lot easier with bridges.  If we don't have a bridge we would rather have a natural resource.  War often breaks out when there is a lack of resources.