Functional Parts Activity

During our animal inquiry we talked about how animals have special parts on their bodies that help them survive.

You choose an animal on pebblego or watch the video below:

Leave a comment below:
What is a functional part of an animal that you found?

Friday Dance Party

On Friday mornings I would play this song for a "dance party" right before our Morning Meeting.  The kids loved taking turns showing off their dance moves.
Surprise them and play it for them at home and have your own dance party!

Happy Friday!  We made it through our first official week of quarantine!

Functional Parts

We have been doing a Steve Jenkins author study while we are doing our animal inquiry.  Steve Jenkins is such a great author and illustrator (and often works with Robin Page on his books), and we have really enjoyed his books.

These are just a few of our favorites:

By studying his books, Steve Jenkins has taught us to to think in different ways about animals.

Steve Jenkins calls them "Creature Features" and 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.

We watched the owl video a second time and labeled the functional parts.

Here are functional parts that we noticed:

You might also enjoy this video: 

If you're interested to learn more about Steve Jenkins and his artwork, click on the video below!

Thank you, Steve Jenkins!

Organizing for Our Animal Inquiry

Our classroom library is a big consideration as we prepare for the serious research we do during our animal inquiry.  Right now we have about eight tubs of "animals and habitats" books, plus various animal books mixed in with our "just right" leveled book baskets.
We started to do our research by creating "Did You Know?" papers to share the cool facts that we found.

We realized that we were wasting our time trying to find specific animal books that we wanted because there were so many animals and habitats baskets in our classroom library!  In order to easily find the books we need without wasting time searching, we needed to reorganize our classroom library.
To get ready, we had to find all the animal books!  We had quite a big pile as we pulled as many animal books as we could find!

Our pile got bigger...

...and bigger...

 ...and bigger!

 

 Wow!  We have a lot of animal books in our classroom!

As a group, we talked about ways we could organize our books.  We were trying to decide between by habitat, by classification, by skin, or by first letter.

We stood up and tried to persuade people to group them the way we wanted them grouped.  

After a class vote, we decided to sort them based on habitat--then if we wanted to find a book on giraffes, we would look in the 'grasslands' basket.  

Time to organize! Next, we passed our books out around the room based on habitat. 

We realized that when we collaborated, the immense job got done so much more quickly!

Then, we had to label each basket. We created labels for the book baskets.

Such hard workers!

Animal Facts

Forrest brought in a book with some great animal facts. We were interested in the page that described how far a kangaroo could jump:  almost 30 feet!
We got out our rulers to measure this out so we could visualize it. It was surprisingly far!

Of course, we had to see how our jumping compared...

Here is a video where you can learn more about kangaroos:
Thanks for sharing your book with us, Forrest!

Finding Ten

We have been working really hard to watch for and memorize tens partners when we work on math problems. We love this video to help us practice:


 In our morning message we rolled one die and recorded our roll. Then we searched for tens partners to see if we could efficiently add all of our numbers together!

Some of the numbers we broke apart to be able to find tens partners and we were excited to see that almost every number had a tens partner!

Word Detectives

For Reading Workshop we have been working to earn our Word Detective badges. We got a letter from the Super Secret Detective Agency asking for our help to do some top secret word detective missions.
We had lots of missions!  Here are some of them:

We used magnifying glasses to look closely at words...

We also used whiteboards to do slow checks on tricky words. We found this mission to be one of the most effective when we got to tricky parts!  Look at some of the tricky words these word detectives in training were able to solve:

We used word scanners to pay attention to beginnings and endings of words...

Here is the anchor chart where we kept track of all our missions:

 Here are the supplies that helped us to earn our official Word Detective badges:

We were so proud!