Each child in Room 408 has a Personal Word Wall filled with words we need to know in a "snap."
Words that each child can spell in a "snap" are highlighted on their Personal Word Wall.
A few times a week the student chooses a word to work on that is not highlighted. S/he makes the word in a variety of ways in hopes of learning the word so s/he can access it in a "snap" when s/he is reading or writing.
Lydia makes 'like' with Wikki Stix.
Delilah makes 'I'm' with shells.
Asher checks his personal word wall to make sure he records 'before' correctly.
Mason makes 'on' with beans.
Quill makes 'we' with dominoes.
Thatcher makes 'have' with legos.
Declan uses the Word Wizard app to work on 'because.'
Then we take pictures to document our hard work.
The next morning 100% of the class could remember and spell their snap word correctly. Great job, Room 408! 🎉
At the end of our immersion stage, we still had lots of lingering questions. Fortunately, Max's dad is our resident space expert. We emailed him our questions:
Max's dad came in right before break to help answer these questions. He even brought things lioke shuttle models, real meteors, and replicated Mars dust for us to explore!
He prepared a PowerPoint to share pictures and explain answers to our questions.
He even gave us each a dime and had us focus on the eye of Roosevelt. He said that scientists took a picture in the sky that was only the size of Roosevelt's eye on the dime, and they were able to see lots of additional galaxies in just that tiny speck of a picture. Wow!
He shared different types of meteors with us...
...as well as replicated Mars dust.
He even had an old piece of the exterior shuttle material that we could actually touch!
We started the day by making predictions on the Morning Message out what this object was:
We had lots of questions:
After making lots of predictions and inferences about the photograph, we reviewed different sources where we could research for more information. We added photos to our list of learning resources. We reviewed the big question for our inquiry:
For our Jacques Cousteau mini-inquiry, we would be using books, PebbleGo, and photos as resources. We talked about how to record important information on post-it notes. Then we went off to figure out why Jacques Cousteau was so famous!
Some started by investigating photos. They found lots of great information: matching diagrams and photos of inventions and ships. They were able to infer quite a lot about Jacques Cousteau!
Others got right into PebbleGo. We learned how to pause a video in order to write down important learning.
Some chose to research in books.
Regardless of what sources they were using, Room 408 was busy recording their new learning about Jacques Cousteau. We had so much new learning! Our brains were like sponges!
We even inferred that Jacques likes to wear a red hat!
We got together after our research time for sharing our discoveries.
We were amazed at how much learning we did!
Here are two great books about his life.
We learned that he had a hope and dream to be able to breathe underwater and to discover more about the undersea world that he loved so much. This dream sounded impossible, but he eventually invented the Aqualung!
He also bought an old war boat and turned it into an exploring ship, and named it Calypso.
He went on to invent other wonderful ways to explore under the sea.
Even though his dreams seemed impossible, he didn't give up until each one became a reality.
Later he realized that people were harming the ocean with garbage and chemicals. Jacques Cousteau decided to educate the world so everyone could help to preserve the waters in our world.
Here are some videos, if you'd like to learn more about Jacques Cousteau.
Essentially we understood why Jacques Cousteau was famous...
