I See. I Think. I Wonder.: April 2017

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Word Detectives

This week we became official Word Detectives.

It started out when we received this Top Secret mission from the SSDA.

We got right to work on our Top Secret missions. We received one mission each day.

We learned to always STOP when we get to a problem.

We learned to look closely across the whole word to look for clues.

We learned that we need to use all we know to solve tricky problems in our books.

We also learned that when Word Detectives have a hunch about what a word might be, they do a
s-l-o-w check to make sure that our hunch is right.

Lastly, we learned that Word Detectives have partners that help each other out, when needed.

We worked really hard to earn our Top Secret Word Detective status!

Future Leader Dog

Zoe's grandma trains Leader Dogs for people with special needs. We were lucky enough to have her in to answer our questions about Leader Dogs. She even brought a dog in training!

We learned that it is important not to distract a dog while it's working with its owner.

We also learned that only 50% of dogs that enter the Leader Dog program actually end up doing well enough to assist a person with special needs.

Thank you for answering our questions and sharing him with us, Zoe's grandma!

We started a new unit in Writing Workshop. We are working on writing our opinions and supporting them with details and evidence.

To start, we likened opinion writing to a dog show. We watched parts of this video of the Westminster Kennel Club 2017 Dog Show.

We noticed how the judges looked carefully at each dog, comparing qualities across all the breeds.

We practiced this with a set of horses from our classroom animals. We lined them up and compared qualities (such as manes or muscles) across all the horses.

Jozlyn the Horse Judge examines the different horse breeds.

To try this on our own, we each brought in collections of items from home. We looked closely at our collections, picked our "Best in Show" and supported our opinions with evidence.

Josiah brought in a collection of Pokemon cards to compare.

Noah brought in stuffed animals.

Zoe brought in pine cones.

Grady brought in toy cars.

Braylee used seashells.

Claire compared seashells, too.

We are getting really good at supporting our opinions!

Field Trip to the Hwy Dept

We got to go on a field trip to the Highway Department to see all the cool trucks and learn about how they help our county. Plus, we were lucky enough to have Caleb's dad be our tour guide!

We even got hard hats and safety glasses!

He showed us how they use a map to help them get their work done.

So many cool trucks!

We got to see the huge amount of salt that the county uses during the winter.

Trucks, trucks, and more trucks!

At the end of our field trip we even got to step on the scale and predict how much we thought we would weigh.

We weighed about 2700 pounds!

Thanks for a great field trip!

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Penguin Mini Inquiry

During math we took an imaginary trip to Antarctica.

We did a few mini-inquiries about different types of penguins, comparing sizes of different penguins.

First, we learned about Rockhopper penguins.

We researched information about them. Then we used a measuring strip that we made equal to our heights, and compared it to the height of the Rockhopper penguin.

We learned that the Rockhopper is 18 inches tall.

We recorded our info on a data sheet and stored it in our Think Books.

We loved this video about the Rockhopper penguin:

The next day we learned about the King penguin. We found out that it is 3 feet tall, and figured out that 3 feet is the same as 36 inches.

That's a big penguin!

Here is the video we watched about the King penguin.

Tomorrow we will compare these heights to the Emperor penguin.

Which is your favorite penguin?

Stamina!

We're nearing the end of the year and getting ready for second grade...we know we need to continue to build our reading stamina!

For the last few days we set some goals to see how long we could focus as a class and read without losing focus. We gathered a good stack of books, took bathroom & drink breaks, and set a timer...

...and just read like maniacs.

We made it all of thirty seconds before our focus was interrupted, but we didn't give up and tried again. As of 4/20/17 we made it 16 minutes and we stayed focused and read the WHOLE time.

We're shooting for twenty minutes, tomorrow!

Exploration Celebration

April 18th was the big night! We were finally ready to share all of our inquiry projects and our concert music at the Exploration Celebration, which is our biggest event of the year.