We are getting ready to read The Girl Who Could Fly and about someone with an unusual talent. If you could have any superpower in the world what would it be and why?

Welcome Back!! We are going to start easy today with adding comments to a post! On this post in the comment section I would like to know:

2 sentences about you! (What are your hobbies? What are you likes or your dislikes?, etc.)

1 academic goal you have for this school year!

1 goal you have blogging this year! (What do you want to get out of this experience?)

1 personal goal you have this school year!

That would be 5 complete sentences!

Students start back on September 4th! I cannot wait to start our second year blogging and I was even able to incorporate virtual reality into our classroom this year! It’s going to be so awesome watching these kiddos develop into the educational technology leaders of our school and tackle 21st century learning head-on!

Today was bittersweet as I released this past year’s blogs. It was my first year integrating technology in a way that was more meaningful and authentic than any other way I have in the past. This first class will always be special and the growth and excitement that they exhibited was amazing! I can’t wait until next year to see where this wonderfully journey will take us!

What a year! We wrapped up our first year as a blogging classroom and it was such an awesome ride! We concluded the year with a total of 23 different countries visiting our blog and communicating with students from every corner of the globe! This has been a tremendous start to a wild journey that many more students will take as they come through Mr. McCray’s classroom. It does not matter if we fail or succeed we are #nevernotimproving in this class! Congrats outgoing fifth graders! Good luck in middle school!

This past Saturday, Mrs. McCray and I, challenged ourselves by completing an obstacle course race. This race was 13.7 miles and consisted of about 33 obstacles. We completed the race in 6 hrs. and 53 minutes. It was not the fastest time but we were not challenging others…we were challenging ourselves. If something seems scary and daunting that’s ok, but don’t let fear keep you from trying something new. Take challenges in life and in your education and you may surprise yourself with what you can accomplish!

Our students were fortunate enough to welcome local reporters from DVM news to teach them about our blogging program! You can watch the report and read the article below. Way to go 5th Grade at Eastern! You are rockstars!

WDVM News

For the second time in less than a month students here at Eastern were featured by DVM news here in Maryland! On March 28th Eastern Elementary hosted Google Expeditions AR and then on April 17th students were featured due to their global work with blogging! It is an awesome site to see the pride that many of the students take in their work and that it truly shows when they speak about it! I will post the link to the news story as soon as I have it.

Tomorrow is the big day! Google will be bring their pioneer Augmented Reality (AR) program to Eastern Elementary! This is such an exciting opportunity for our students, our teachers, and our community. This is an opportunity to meaningfully engage with cutting edge 21st century technology and delve deeper into content and concepts that would not be possible with just text and pictures! Let’s make our visitors feel welcome and show them the rockstars that we have here at Eastern!

The post next week is all about global issues but there are some interesting events happening this week that you might want to take part in ready for the activities in next week’s challenge.

This is an excellent website showing what happens every day of the year. These are some for this coming week:

• March 19 – International read to me day
• March 20 – World storytelling day
• March 20 – International day of happiness
• March 20 – Won’t you be my neighbour day
• March 21 – World Poetry day
• March 21 – Common courtesy day
• March 21 – World Down Syndrome Day
• March 21 – International day of forests
• March 22 – World Water Day
• March 24 – Earth Hour

Pick one of the days listed and create a blog post informing your readers about the day. Why do some people celebrate it? How do some people celebrate it?