Poetry Cafe

Roses are red, violets are blue. Miss Klipfel's Class says, Thank you! Thank you all for attending and helping make our poetry cafe a HUGE success. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your warm smiles, feverish snaps, and uncontainable chuckles. Without our wonderful audience, our poetry cafe wouldn't have been such a success. Congratulations to all the 4th graders for taking a risk performing their poems, sharing their musical abilities, artistic skills, and hidden talents. Impressive is an understatement! We also can't thank you enough for your kind words, emails, and comments of encouragement. We hope the rest of your February is filled with chocolates, hearts, and lots of love. Make sure to check out all our published poems here & here:

Klipper Bowl VII

Are you ready for some fffooooootball? 4th graders were geared up and ready to go for the sixth annual Klipper Bowl. Teams were introduced while blasting their team chosen song, then we completed warm-up stretches, huddled up for last minute strategies, and then stood for the national anthem. Next up was our coin toss for kickoff return placement. Lucky teams who guessed the coin toss correctly had a 20-yard kickoff return while others started on the 10-yard line. Using perseverance and grit, teams quickly caught up.

Teams then ran "plays" from their playbook to gain yardage on the field. "Plays" included using different forms of texts (articles, media, poems, etc.) and completing activities. Players learned about who invented football and completed a comprehension activity worth 50 yards. Teams read a Wonderoplois article explaining what makes the Super Bowl so super and then completed a Google form for 30 yards. Teams could choose to run a play and apply all their figurative language knowledge to create football similes, metaphors, alliterations, personifications, and onomatopoeias.

The plays worth the most yards involved correctly placing team logos for all the Southeast region teams (yes, we have been learning all about the Southeast in Social Studies). Other plays included reading a passage about Tom Brady, learning about the history of the Super Bowl, placing fraction footballs on the correct place on the field, and reading a football poem to determine the mood and purpose all for different amounts of yards.

Once teams correctly completed a play, they brought it to Referee Klipfel for the final check and to advance on the field. After gaining enough yardage to make it down the field, teams scored a touchdown! Complete with touchdown dances! Teams then got to throw for point conversions. Team cooperation and good sportsmanship earned extra yards or kicks for points at ANY time throughout the game. "Good job", "keep working hard", and other forms of encouragement were heard around the field all day. No yellow flags needed to be thrown.

Referee Klipfel and teams had one SUPER day! Klipper Bowl VII is complete so now onto baseball season.

Greek Myths

Written by guest blogger: Makenna & Addison G.

Just like Hercules, we had to complete 12 labors. Working in Greek Myth teams our first labor was to make a sail together based on what Greek God or Goddess would guide us. We figured out which god we got in the god quiz and then learned so much about them. We even learned the Greek Goddess Athena has a city named after her! Artemis’s symbol is a bow and arrow and Athena’s is owls and snakes. We took and drew these symbols about our god on our sails. Check some of them out below.

 

After that, we did labors 2-11. We had to read different versions of myths and answer questions about them or solve puzzles. We learned about the Greek gods along the way and the themes you find in myths! I loved labor number 6. It was the one about Persephone and Hades. Deciding whether it was a nature myth or a lesson myth was no Herculean Task! It was a nature myth because it talks about Persephone eating 4 pomegranate seeds in the underworld. (That's supposed to be why there are four months of winter.) We learned about so many other myths too like King Midas, the Trojan Horse, and Pandora’s box. Myths are so much fun to read and talk about.


Every myth that we learned about had some type of cool character. Like Zeus is the king of the gods! Hades is the god of the underworld and Poseidon is the god of the water. They are all brothers. But not every myth has a good guy. In some myths there are monsters! They stop everyone from doing stuff which is why some myths are lessons. Some monsters we learned about were Sirens, Scylla, and Cybous. Some are beasts, like Cerberus

On the 12th labor, we had a project choice board to pick from and it had a bunch of project options. My group and I chose the Wanted poster about Medusa. We said she was wanted because she stole The Statue Of Liberty. Another group made a WANTED poster for Hades, while others made Newspapers and one group even made a Kahoot to test our Myth knowledge. Myths were really fun to learn about, and we both had a lot of fun writing this blog post!

Touching Space

Our class did something out of this world—literally! Dr. Stifler let us borrow something truly extraordinary, pieces of the Moon and Mars from the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum. We couldn’t believe it—real rocks from outer space, right here in our hands! First, we learned how these incredible pieces made their way to Earth. Meteorites, which are rocks from space, travel through the atmosphere and land on our planet. The ones we held were fragments of larger meteorites that scientists know came from the Moon and Mars because of their unique composition. It felt amazing to touch something billions of years old!

It was hard to believe that these tiny pieces of rock could tell us so much about the Moon, Mars, and beyond. We all agreed that it was one of the coolest days ever. Thank you Dr. Stifler for sharing these treasures with us and letting us experience a little piece of space! Who knows—maybe one day, one of us will discover a new meteorite, or even walk on the Moon or Mars ourselves. 🌕🚀🌌