Space Party!

On the last day together before our Christmas Break, we had our space party!
The morning started out by getting sucked into the black hole of our classroom.

We celebrated surviving the black hole and earned NASA stickers!

The room was decorated with constellations, planets hanging from the ceiling, and starry lights.

That morning we tried astronaut food!

Thanks to some great parents who sent in astronaut food, we tried applesauce from pouches...

We tried freeze-dried fruit...

The verdict is still out about the fruit--either they loved it or questioned it!

We even tried astronaut ice cream!

Later we went to fun space stations!

We played with space slime...

...made straw rockets...

...made a nebula in a jar...

...made models of the Earth/Moon/Sun orbits....

...played Space Bingo...

...and dressed up our stuffed animals as astronauts!

My mom even stopped by from South Carolina to join in the fun!

Being creative is always messy, though!

Fortunately Room 408 is excellent at cleaning up!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  See you in 2019!

Becoming Experts...

We are slowly becoming experts on our Research Club topics.
We are researching, researching, researching!

Jordan & Grunt

Jordan shared his dog, Grunt with us!

He was a sweetheart!

Sea Stars

For math we began making a Sea Star class quilt.  We started by noticing different mathematical patterns that we can find in quilts, such as this one.

We also read a poem about sea stars and researched cool facts about them.

We learned that sea stars regenerate their arms, they aren't like fish because they don't have brains or backbones, and that when they eat, their stomach comes out of their body!  We found a youtube video to prove this last fact:

Next, we each created a Sea Star quilt block.

Then we decorated a piece of paper with dot painters.  These will be the design papers from which we'll cut our sea stars.  

Sea Stars will be a perfect way to notice counting by 5s patterns!

Five...

Ten...

Fifteen...

Stay tuned to see what you notice about our sea star quilt!

What are you thinking about sea stars?

Genius Hour

We organized our wonders for the week and got ready for Genius Hour on Friday:

This is how we grouped our wonders:

After we got our research sources in order, we got to work!

  After we did our research, we gathered supplies to make a representation of our learning.

We learned a lot and had lots of fun!