Hi Everybody,
We are the 22 students from Mr. Van Kampen¹s 4th grade class at New Groningen Elementary School in Zeeland Michigan. If you have a hard time finding Zeeland on a map find Holland and Grand Rapids and Zeeland is between those two cities. Our longitude is, 42:48:45 North, our latitude is, 86:01:07 West.
In our district there is 1 kindergarten building, 4 elementary buildings, 2 middle schools and 1 high school. All together there are 4,659 students in our district. Our building has 428 students grades 1-5, there are 18 classrooms. Some of our favorite things to do are art, music, computers and playing with our teacher at recess. We study science, math, social studies, reading and writing. We have 184 days in our school year and we go to school for 7 hours a day. Most of us enjoy reading, doing anything outdoors and playing sports, such as tennis, football, soccer, wrestling baseball, and basketball in our free time.
Another pastime many of us enjoy is water sports such as; fishing, boating, canoeing and swimming, which is a good thing living where we do. We are only 7 miles from Lake Michigan. Michigan is called the ³Water Wonderland² for good reason. It is bordered by four of the Great Lakes, Michigan, Superior, Huron and Erie. There are over 3,251 miles of shoreline in Michigan making it the longest freshwater shoreline in the world. There are over 11,037 inland lakes and 36,000 miles of rivers in the State. In Michigan you are never more than 6 miles from a lake or river or 85 miles from one of the Great Lakes.
Being as close to the Lake as we are, our weather changes a lot each season. In the summer our average temperatures are in the 80¹s, but we get some days of more than 100. In the winter we can get very cold days, as cold as 20 below when the wind is blowing. The average temperature for the winter is 10¹s-20¹s. We can get a lot of snow too because we are so close to the Lake. Our average snow fall is 120 inches.
Well that is all for now from Michigan. We would like to write to some of you if you are interested. You can e-mail our teacher to set things up.
Sincerely,