I See. I Think. I Wonder.: March 2015

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Creature Power!

During the immersion phase of our animal inquiry, we have been thinking about how each animal has external parts on its body to help it survive.

Lily calls these parts the animals' "accessories." Wild Kratts call them "Creature Powers." Any way you describe it, animals have cool functional parts!

What parts do you see on these animals that help them survive?

We watched a special video about an owl and the special features it has for hunting.

You might also enjoy this video:

What animal parts can you think of that help that animal survive?

The kids always love Learning Mural Day, with all the collaboration and creating involved. I love it because it's a great way to reflect on how much we are learning in Room 408!
February was the shortest month so far, but we still did a lot of learning.

Done! Dane's crossing it off...

Jill made Anansi, the trickster spider!

Anderson working on 100th Day

Teagan making representations of our crafts on Friendship Day

Aaron working on our PJ party

Drew & Dane representing our sea star mini-inquiry

Robin, Breleigh, & Lily making 100 cookies from Uncle Wolf

I don't think I ever posted our learning mural from January...

January Learning Mural

Here is our finished project...our learning from February:

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Animal Immersion

For the past week we have been immersed in materials such as animal artifacts, models, and photo cards in order to activate any schema we have about animals. Students have gone from simply playing with the materials to some serious sorting and categorizing.

Come experience the immersion stage of our animal inquiry!

We used our ipad to record some of our thinking during the immersion stage:

We decided to recategorize the books in our classroom to make them easier to find during our animal inquiry. Room 408 decided to sort the books by habitats. It was a lot of work, but we did it!

Presidents' Day

We did a mini-inquiry to answer the question of why we missed school on Monday. Before we began our inquiry, we discussed sources we could go to in order to get answers. This is what we came up with:

Then we used sources to learn more information about presidents and Presidents' Day.

Here are all the details:

We made posts to our Kidblogs to share what we learned.

Who Could Forget...

...the animal play?!?!

Many students in the class collaborated to create an animal play. They designed costumes, sets, wrote songs, and performed, all on their own!

The Animal Play cast:

The great audience:

Since this group is so gung-ho on plays, we'll do an organized class play. I'm thinking one of the Anansi tales, since we love them so much!

Which Anansi tale do you think we should do?

Friendship Day Stations

We had a lot of fun at our Friendship Day stations.

We took the Candy Heart Stacking Challenge.

We used a code to color a mystery picture.

We led each other in Bingo games.

Some of us really persevered at stacking candy hearts!

We sorted and graphed candy hearts.

We sorted, grouped, and categorized valentines.

We did research on "hearts."

We made heart creations.

Here is a video of all the fun:

Author Visit

Lily's sister, Makenna, came to visit our classroom on Friday. She and her class authored a book in the style of Mo Willem's books with the characters, Elephant & Piggy.
She shared the book with us.

We loved it!

Sisters & Authors

Friendship Day!

Our LEADS family got together for a fun Friendship Day. We had a game room, a building room, and a craft room. We also had a great friendship snack to enjoy!