HIghway Department Field Trip

Here are the highlights from our Shawano County Highway Department field trip.

Judging Our Collections

We started our opinion unit in Writing Workshop.
We watched this AKC dog show judging video and noticed how the judge compared attributes, judging one thing at a time and frequently lining them up so he could get a good view.


 We brought in collections from home to judge and award a first place prize.  We needed to make sure we gave reasons why we thought it deserved first prize.

Next, we wrote our opinions about which deserved first prize from our collections.

Are Zoos Good or Bad?

At the end of our animal inquiry, we got into a discussion about zoos.
We know Jane Goodall and responded to the question in our morning message.

Everyone thought Jane Goodall would like zoos.

Then we watched a few videos.  One listed the pros and cons of zoos, one tried to convince us that zoos are bad, and another tried to convince us that zoos are good.

Some agreed that zoos were helpful, some thought animals were better off in their own habitats, and some had a mixture of opinions.  We got together with partners and discussed our feelings and opinions.

Next we shared our ideas with the group.

Finally, we took some private time and wrote our opinions about zoos in our Think Books.

Finally, we watched part of this video to see what Jane Goodall really thinks about zoos.

Georgia O'Keeffe

One of my favorite artists is Georgia O'Keeffe, and I couldn't wait to share her art with Room 408.
We read a few books about her life and work:

We also studied her paintings to see what her work was like.

We noticed how she loved to paint nature and looked closely at her subjects.

We even tried looking at they sky through bones just like she did with this painting.

We brought in nature objects and looked at them closely just like Georgia O'Keeffe, and got inspiration for our own nature paintings.

Here are the artists in residence!

We made lots of paintings to display at the Exploration Celebration.

Here is a video about Georgia O'Keeffe:

We look forward to sharing our paintings at the Exploration Celebration!

Animal Teachers

During our animal inquiry we have been focusing on how animal parents are teachers for their babies.  Some things are instinct, but some skills have to be taught.

We watched this video about an otter mother teaching her baby how to swim.

While we watched, we took notes on what we noticed.

Here are some other videos about parents teaching their animal babies.

Maple Syrup with Nora & Her Mom

Nora and her mom taught us about making maple syrup.

We even got to try some!

Thank you, Nora & Jess!

Silent Auction Benches

We finished our benches just in time for the silent auction at the Exploration Celebration...and then Shawano got 33.5 inches of snow!  We rescheduled our celebration for April 30th.
Here is our space inquiry bench:

And here is our animal inquiry bench:

What a creative group of kids!