Galimotos!

Hillcrest/LEADS had a special Culture Day this month.  Room 408 choose to research countries in Africa.  Part of our research included reading the book Galimoto.

A galimoto is a little toy made out of wire and recycled materials, and it is usually a vehicle of some sort.  Room 408 decided to make our own galimotos out of pipe cleaners.

Come see our galimotos at the Culture Fair this week!

Reflecting on our Presentations

During each "Going Public" space presentation, we asked the audience to share their learning in the form of sticky notes. The audience posted their learning on a chart for each group.

 After we completed our presentations, it was interesting to reflect on the learning that we collected.

We loved teaching about our learning, and we're already looking forward to our animal inquiry!

Culture Day: Africa!

Culture Day for Hillcrest/LEADS is coming up. Each classroom at Hillcrest/LEADS chose a culture to study and teach about at our Culture Fair next week. We studied the African culture.
We started by immersing ourselves in books and videos about different African countries.

We especially loved reading the Anansi tales...stories about the trickster spider in African tales.

We also read a book about the places, people, animals, and life in Africa.

An eye-opening book was definitely The Water Princess by Susan Verde.

We realized that many people in our world do not have access to water.

Here is the story behind the book.

Here is a read aloud video of the book. 

We look forward to visiting the Culture Fair in the upper resource room next week to learn about other cultures of our world!

Practicing Space Presentations

In order to get ready for our "Go Public" stage, we need to practice!  Our posters are completed, our formal presentations are scheduled, so all we need to do is get ready...

We are nearing the end of our first big inquiry and we have gotten so many great skills under our belts, which we'll be able to apply to other inquiries this year. This chart has grown with us over the past few months.

Thank You, Mr. Dombrowski!

We can't believe that our time with Mr. Dombrowski is up.
We wish you the best of luck in your teaching career, Mr. Dombrowski!

Esti-Mysteries

We have been enjoying Esti-Mysteries from Steve Wyborney's site.
It has been getting our math brains revved up about estimating and building strong math concepts!

This is a great site to check out!

Planning for the Go Public Stage

Now that we have organized our learning, we are ready to figure out who will be responsible for teaching specific big ideas that we have learned. We looked at our learning charts and each person picked a big idea to teach.
We wrote down our big teaching ideas to get ready to "go public."

Then we started making sure our posters would be good ways to teach and demonstrate our learning. We painted the big ideas on our posters.

 What great evidence of learning! At the beginning of our space inquiry, our sun was drawn in the typical way of a young child, but now it is complete with solar flares!