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Greetings from Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A.! We are a class of 5th grade students at Mountain View Elementary School in Santa Barbara, California. Our teacher is Mrs. Wagner. We have 14 boys (52 %) in our class and 13 (48 %) girls. The grades in our school go from Kindergarten to Sixth Grade and we have 352 students in our school. We attend school from September through the middle of June each year. In 5th grade we study Language Arts (Reading, Writing, English grammar, Spelling) Math, Science, American History, Geography, Music, and Art. We have Physical Education 3 times a week. Our whole 5th grade puts on a big play every spring with every 5th grader having a part. We practice for almost 1 ‡ months and then we do the play two times for our school with ‡ coming at a time. We also do two night performances for our parents and the public. It is something we look forward to doing all year long. We have a great computer lab at our school that we visit once a week. It has about 31 computers in it. We also have 3 computers in our classroom and have internet access. We are part of a project called Computers For Families. Each of us has a computer at home with Internet access. Mrs. Wagner gives us regular assignments to do on the Internet. It's fun and we are learning a lot. Santa Barbara is located in Southwest
California (about 98 miles northwest of Los Angeles) on the coast of the
Pacific Ocean and the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains. It is located at
34.5 N. and 119.5 W. Santa Barbara is considered a resort community and
a popular tourist spot. It began as an old Spanish mission town and much
of its Spanish background is still preserved. In fact, every August, we
have a week of Fiesta celebrating Old Spanish Days. The mission in Santa
Barbara was built in 1786 and is still being used today. It is known as
the "Queen of the Missions." We enjoy mild weather most of the year, beautiful
beaches, and many outdoor sports.
Aircraft products, aerospace equipment, and electronic components are some of the products manufactured here. Petroleum is produced off shore. Oranges, lemons, strawberries, avocados and many vegetables are grown in Santa Barbara. We are lucky to have a multicultural community in Santa Barbara. People from many countries call this area home. In fact, we have community celebrations at Oak Park throughout the year celebrating Japanese, Irish, Greek, French, and German cultures, to name only a few! Because of our cultural diversity, we get to taste a wide variety of foods! We are thinking of doing the project of connecting math to our everyday lives and finding out how our parents use math, or looking into issues of equity and finding out how minorities are represented in our school library. We haven't decided which we will do yet. Maybe we will do both!
From Mrs. Pat Moore and her students Greetings from Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A.! To find out information about our school and city, read the fifth grade email sent from Mrs. Wagner's class at Mt. View Elementary School. They composed a very thorough introduction. In our sixth-grade classroom we are learning about ancient civilizations beginning with the formation of the earth, through theories and discoveries regarding hominids, to studies of Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Indian and Mayan cultures. Last month our sixth grade went to Catalina Island (a small island off the coast of California) for a week. It is a science camp where we learned about marine biology, geology and terrestrial animals by participating in many hands-on activities, labs and snorkeling trips. Many of us are in a math enrichment program offered at our school once a week for those who want an extra challenge in math in addition to our regular math program. A few of us will go on to compete in a Math Super Bowl county competition. (Our country is divided into states, and each state is divided into geographical units called counties, and each county may be made up of several cities.) In this math class we were given a problem to solve. We were wondering if you would like to try to find the answer. There are 12 bags of gold. One of the bags does not weigh the same as the other 11 bags. Maybe it weighs more, or maybe it weighs less. You have a scale to weigh the bags and 3 tries to find out which bag is different. What do you do? Finally, we would like you to know that in California that for our age group (11 and 12 year olds) there are some on-going fads, they include: Pokemon, DVD (movies that are on CD type disks), playing and watching football, listening to CDs by the musical groups such as Limpbiscuit, Nsinc, Backstreet Boys and Brittany Spears. We look forward to communicating and collaborating with a country outside the United States, as well as connecting to schools within our country.
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