950
Central Ave
Fultondale,
AL 35968
January 15, 2008
Dear Allie,
Hey girl, what’s up? It’s nice to hear from you too! Well, you heard right. I watch Andy Griffith all the time! I think that it is an amusing show as well. The other day he was rolling around in their bag of cat food. He got a spanking, but not a bad one.
I didn’t go any where for Christmas. I just went to my Nana and Papa’s house and stayed over there until Christmas Day. I actually knew some stuff I was going to get like Guitar Hero, and a KoRn (It’s a meal band named KoRn) and some other things.
Wow, I don’t even like to travel for 5 hours much less 18 hours. How can you stand it? Actually the reason I can’t stand it is because I can’t really do anything in the car or I’ll get carsick. How about you do you get carsick? Anywhere we travel is 1 to 5 hours. So I hope you had fun in all those places you went.
There’s a
project that we did before we got out for Christmas and it was called a pod
cast. It was a really fun project.
It would be really cool if your class could do it.
Mrs. Ramsay said that ours had to be set during the Great Depression to
go with our Bud, not Buddy book. Then
you have to make the script for the group.
Next, you have to make the sounds or bring something from home to make
the sounds to go along with your script to make sound effects that help the
listener “see” your story. After
that you practice every day before you have to record.
Finally it’s the day you record, and you have to make sure you’re
ready because you only get a couple of times to do it.
You open the program and click on record. Then you post it to
mypodcast.com. It was a lot of fun.
There was
another project after that one and it was called A Choose Your on Adventure
Story. Have you ever read a Choose
Your Own Adventure story? They are fun because you get to make choices about
what you do in the story. It was another cool project. It took a lot longer than
the podcast to do. First, Mrs.
Ramsay read an example of one so we could have an idea of what we should write.
It also had to be set during the Great Depression.
Second, you and your team write a story that is true to the time period
and you have choices at the end of each slide to continue your journey.
After you create your slides, you add hyperlink buttons for each choice.
After we typed in the story and added hyperlink buttons, then we added
transitions and clipart to the slides. Then,
we saved it to Mrs. Ramsay’s pen drive and she uploaded it to our website.
They are really fun to read. You
should check them out.
Well also I loved your story. It finally snowed here yesterday. It didn’t stick to the ground, but it was fun to play in. Well, bye! Talk to you later. Love, Amber
950
Central Ave
Fultondale, AL 35068
January16, 2008
Dear
Quinn,
It was nice that you gave that money to
charity. I’ve never really done anything like that. I would like to though. I
heard you went on field trip. Your field trips are different from ours. I also
read that you got a lot of snow. It doesn’t snow in Alabama. It gets to about
32 degrees, but it never snows. How do elks look? I’ve never seen one before.
We’ve started a new book called A Wrinkle in Time.
It’s a really good book. It was written by Madeleine L’ Engle It got a
Newberry award. The book is really thick. It was written in the 1900’s. She
has written many books.
We do still have a big drought. We still have
water, just not a lot. We have enough to take baths and showers.
We have to hear about it on the news a lot, but we still have water. Many
people have been conserving water. I don’t know if it helps or not. On the
plus side, some people say that it’s going away.
Also, Mrs. Ramsay is teaching us about parts of
a paragraph. We‘ve already gone over it, but she’s refreshing our memory. In
Alabama, we have to know that on the SAT10. What do you have to know on the
SAT10 in Arizona? Our math and science teacher Mrs. Wicker is teaching us
different things also so we can know it on the SAT10.
We also take a writing test called the ADA and the ARMT (Alabama Reading
and Math Test).
We also made our own Choose You Own Adventure story on the computers
using Power Point. It involved a lot of typing. In my group, we put in real
pictures to go with our stories. Mrs. Ramsay liked how we used real pictures. It
went really well with the story that we typed.
Our stories went along with the Great Depression and Bud, Not Buddy.
On each slide you had a little bit of a story and two choices to make of
what you wanted to do next in the story. Each
choice had a different hyperlink button to take you to the slide that continued
the story for your choice. You can
see them on our class website. They
are a lot of fun.
Something else we did was make our pod cast. It had to be related to the
Great Depression. My group made one called The Shadow. It was an old radio show
around the Great Depression time. It was really cool. Mrs. Ramsay comes up with
the coolest things for us to do.
Sincerely,
950
Central Ave.
Fultondale,
AL 35068
January
14, 2008
Dear Tony,
Hi, it’s me Avril. I
wanted to know what letter in “bacon” you misspelled.
I don’t know if I am a good speller or not.
The Spelling Bee was on January 9;I lost with the word “diorama.”
As you can see when you pronounce it the “o” sounds like an “a.”
I don’t get to go with my class to fieldtrips like Georgia because my
dad thinks it’s too far. I think
he gets worried. My favorite water
creature is the dolphin. I don’t
think the drought is really affecting us, but then maybe it is and maybe it
isn’t. Fortunately, nothing has
been damaged and let’s hope nothing does get damaged.
I don’t know how to answer your last question.
It’s alright if you ask too many questions, I’m used to it because my
4 year old brother asks like a million questions about one thing in particular.
My little brother is very curious. I
think we had a tornado on…. Wednesday. I
guess that was good. I would say we
did do stories like that. Over here
in Alabama, Christmas already passed. For
Christmas, I got a CD player. Next
year I may ask for some CDs. For
now I use some of my parent’s CDs. My
parents have some CDs that I really like.
We’ve done 3 projects since we last talked.
The first one is making a “Fractured Fairy Tale book jacket.”
Here are the steps to making one: First, you pick a traditional fairy
tale; it can be “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella” or whatever
fairy tale you would like. Then you
change one of the story elements. Second,
you have to make a rough draft of everything you need.
The first one will be your prewriting.
Then, you write a rough draft and after that you do a final draft.
Next, you fold a sheet of paper in half and on one side you make a title
with the drawing. After that, you
open the sheet of paper and on the left side you kind of tease the reader by
giving them a little of information and then kind of leaving them to want to
keep reading. Then, on the other
side you write a little bit about yourself.
Then, you type it. Mrs. Ramsay made a template for us so we could type it.
An extra thing we did was grab a few sheets of copy paper and actually
make a little book with illustrations and everything.
On this one you don’t have to include the Teaser or the About the
Author part. So, these are the steps to making a “Fractured Fairy Tale
book jacket.” I hope you enjoy
doing this project!!! Look on our
class website to see some examples.
The second
project we made was our “Choose Your Own Adventure Story” which we did as a
team. The title of my group’s
title is “Rolling Through the Great Depression.”
This is how you do this project: First, you get with a team and get eight
index cards there you will write your story here is a list I you need it:
1st
card: Title of slide
2nd
card: Beginning of story with two choices
3rd
card: Choice one with two more choices at the end
4th
card: Choice two with two more choices at the end
5th
card: >
6th
card: > all of these have to have a conclusion because
7th
card: > it’s the end
8th
card: >
After
this, you make a power point slide for each card, this is how you link it: You
link #1 to #2, and #2 to #3 and #4. Then, you link #3 to #5 and #6 and #4to #7 and #8 using
hyperlink buttons. Finally, you can
put a background and POOOOF!!!!! You now have a power point slide show.
The
third project we did was called a “Pod Cast.”
Here is one very important thing you will need and it’s a microphone. To do this you will also need a group. First, you gather with your group and make up a radio program
that existed during the Great Depression. You
and your group needs to make up a script. Second, you have to study the scripts that way you can know
your lines when you get to it. Third,
when you’re ready to do your pod cast, you’re going to ask Mrs. Cooper about
that because you have to have a password and Mrs. Ramsay was the one that typed
the password for, and we didn’t get to see the password because we had to turn
around while she was typing it. Fourth,
Mrs. Ramsay said it shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes because after those 2
minutes, it gets boring. Finally,
if you like the way that your Pod Cast came out then it’s WONDERFUL!!!
I hope you have fun and you enjoy doing this project.
I also wanted to tell you a little of information about my group’s pod
cast. Our title was “The Case of the Missing Motor Oil.”
My character’s name was Scarlet. Here
are the rest of the characters- Mrs. Maryann, Mr. Demetre, Will, and Mr. Bill.
It’s about Mrs. Maryann’s missing motor oil and as we go by (we’re
the neighbors) she asks us “Do you know who replaced my motor oil with
Grandpa’s maple syrup?” I
don’t want to spoil the rest so if you want to here the rest you can go online
to Mrs. Ramsay’s website. Just in
the case that you don’t know it it’s www.ramsaysclass.com.
We’ve
done something I really enjoyed with the Social Studies lesson we had.
It was called a Colonial Newspaper; we could name it anything we wanted.
My group’s newspaper was called “The Revolutionary News.”
In our newspaper we wrote about the battles of Lexington and Concord, the
Boston Massacre (where 5 colonists were killed), an interview with Paul Revere,
a map of the route that Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott took to
warn the colonists “the British are coming,” and finally we did an
advertisement for a job. I’ll
tell you a little about each of these. The
title of my article is “Battle Strikes between British and Colonists.” In it I wrote about the battles of Lexington and Concord
where many people got hurt. In the
one that talks about the Boston Massacre we titled that “The Evils of the
British.” Here my team member
wrote about where 5 colonists were killed by the British soldiers.
In the interview my team member like asked questions and he answered
those questions by writing what Paul Revere would say.
Finally, the ad we wrote was to find a blacksmith that would work coal
mining. These are the things we did
in our colonial newspaper.
We
have started reading a new book called A Wrinkle in Time.
Mrs. Ramsay told us that we could understand it better than adults, but
one of my classmates asked Mrs. Ramsay if that meant that she couldn’t
understand it. Her response to us
was that she wasn’t like most adults. So
far as much as we’ve read, I’ve loved this book. Unfortunately, I was absent
the day we finished reading Bud not Buddy.
I really would have liked reading the ending. Anyhow I still have enjoyed the books that we’ve read in
reading class. Do you remember that
November reading contest I told you about?
Where we had to read as many books in the month of November?
Well, we didn’t win. Mrs.
Little won, she was my third grade teacher.
I still felt good for her because there’s a teacher that wins every
year. Luckily, this year they got beat. At least some one else got the chance to win this year.
Here
are some questions for you. Besides
baseball, basketball, and football what are other sports you like?
I like soccer and baseball. What
is your favorite animal? Mine is
the horse, the cat, and the dog. What
day of winter is your birthday? My
birthday is August 26. I have a
cousin whose birthday is in January 25, if it were December 25 it would be cool.
What is your favorite song? My
favorite song is a song called Big Girls Don’t Cry, and it is by a
singer called Fergie. What kind of
state quarters do you have? Do you
like any holiday in specific? My
favorite holiday is Christmas because you get to give and get presents. This is all I have to tell you for know.
I hope you write back soon!!
Your
E-pal,
Avril