Week 10 - Start of our 3-D Oregon Map
/This week was very short for some of our Sea Lions, but we made the most of our time together. It has been fun to see what sort of activities students choose to work on during their free time: several students started writing messages with morse code or their own made-up codes; another student is creating a big class poster with signatures and photos of our classmates; one student likes to practice making their own Google Slides with morning check-in questions (similar to what Ms. Susan uses to start our class each day); and others enjoy drawing fun pictures to add to our classroom bulletin board. I wish I could snap more photos of these creative Sea Lions using their imaginations!
Our math lessons have shifted to a focus on finding factors of numbers. To go with that, we spent a little time reviewing how to do long division, but Ms. Susan is seeing that we could use some additional practice to become more familiar with the basic division facts.
The Sea Lions began reading our group novel for our book club this week. So far, the students have been very committed to completing the assigned chapter readings (even finishing at home if they run out of time during class). We noticed that this book has quite a few unfamiliar vocabulary words, so we also spent time looking up definitions for some of them in the dictionary. The class will have our first book club discussion next week, where we’ll get to ask questions about what we read and share our thoughts and opinions with each other. The plan is for these discussions to become more and more student-led as the Sea Lions get familiar with the process.
We’ve been continuing to work on our Writer’s Workshop stories each day. Several Sea Lions have their books almost ready to be published, and they’ve been working on editing the capitalization, punctuation, and spelling in their writing.
For our Oregon unit of study, we decided to construct a giant 3-D map showing the physical features of Oregon that we’ve been exploring. We will be using salt dough to create the shape of Oregon on our map, and then building up and sculpting all the different mountain ranges, rivers, and lakes. We needed a way to draw the outline of Oregon on our cardboard base, so the Sea Lions did lots of brainstorming and problem-solving to find a solution. We ended up projecting a picture of Oregon from Ms. Susan’s laptop onto the whiteboard, and then having some students hold the cardboard box in place while another student traced the outline. The Sea Lions also engineered a stand using a table and some chairs to help support the heavy box. The whole process took lots of teamwork, problem-solving, and patience!
Since half of the Sea Lions class was out on Friday, we decided to wait for next week before we start adding the salt dough to our map. Instead, we got to measure ingredients and mix up a batch of salt dough. We also learned about topographic maps and elevation. We noticed that even though the southeastern region of Oregon is made up of flat basins and is like a desert, it is still a much higher elevation than the Coast Range mountains in the west.
The Sea Lions have been invited to join the Otters class each afternoon during Project Exploration time. The students love this opportunity to explore different materials in the other classroom as well as to interact with more friends. So far this has been going well for both classes, and we’re hoping to make this our regular routine.
