Mystery Visitor to Outdoor Classroom
/We are finding so many interesting creatures in our outdoor classroom this week! We found a ginormous praying mantis. We are guessing that it was one that we released at the end of last year. Some of us got to hold it. We also found a moth, spiders, and a bee. On Tuesday we found animal tracks near the pond. We noticed the plants were scattered too. We hypothesized about what type of animal could have been visiting the pond at nighttime. We referenced an animal track book to try to determine who left the tracks. Then we looked at the footage from the outdoor classroom video camera to see if the visitor was caught on tape- he was! It was a raccoon. When we visit the library next week we will check out some books about raccoons. We are speculating about where the raccoon is living. This week our parent volunteers started! We are lucky to have so many parent volunteers this year. We have parents to read with children and play math board games during numeracy. We also have a parent teaching children some basic coding concepts, two parents working on book bag sewing project, and several parent guest speakers about various topics. A parent came in today to read us a hilarious book in Spanish. Our college buddies visited to read with us Mondays and we took our weekly library trip on Tuesday. In Writer’s Workshop this week we are working on publishing our stories. We are talking about how we fix up our writing when we publish. We talked about adding details, checking sentences for capitals and periods, and being sure that our writing is legible. We learned our Otter class song this week and added it to our poetry notebooks. We also discussed what makes a good leader. We worked in teams to create skits about what a good leader looks likes and what a good leader DOESN’T look like. Students enjoyed acting out their skits in front of the class.
