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!

February Learning Mural

Once again, Learning Mural Day is here!
Here is our brainstormed list of everything we learned about in February.

We always practice kindness, acceptance, and good manners when we decide who will work on what topic.  Everyone's name is on a stick in a bag, and we pick a stick.  Whoever is picked gets to pick a topic and asks the class, "Who would like to collaborate with me on _____?" Then they invite someone who has their hand raised by asking, "_____ will you please collaborate with me?"  If no one raises their hand, they still invite someone and we have discussed that the only correct answer is, "Yes." 

Then off we go to create a representation of each topic!

When we are finished with our project, we lay it on the learning mural but do not glue it down.

Then we go to the board, erase the topic we represented and choose a new one.

Once we are finished, I take about 15 minutes after school to arrange and glue down all the projects, making sure they all fit!

Silent 'e'

We have been noticing that many words have a silent 'e' at the end.  Our spelling focus this week was noticing and using the silent 'e' if we heard a long vowel, like in the word wall words 'like', 'came', 'make', and 'here.'
These are some fun videos that we like about silent 'e'.