Week 2 - Brain Study and Using our Microscope
/The Sea Lions are starting to get more into the swing of our routines and daily learning activities. This week we began learning how to write in cursive, which we will continue working on regularly, and we are starting to spend some time each week practicing spelling and learning new vocabulary. The class continues to enjoy their time to write freely during Writer’s Workshop. Our budding authors are writing stories in a variety of styles: personal info booklets, fictional diaries, graphic novels, and imaginative fantasy stories. It has been fun reading what they add to their stories each day! For math this week, we began learning about place value for numbers up to the 100,000s.
In addition to free-choice independent reading each day, we have been working on improving and simplifying our classroom library organization. The Sea Lions classroom inherited a bunch of books from some retiring teachers, so we are now working as a team to go through the books and vote on whether they are good quality, appropriate for 3rd-4th grade, and interesting to the students. Through this process, we also learned about different genres and discussed what types of qualities make a good book. The Sea Lions have been enjoying taking ownership and having a say in which books get to be part of our library.
We have been learning about our brains and how we process information through the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. Students learned about the roles these parts of the brain play, and we brainstormed ways we can help calm our minds down when we are feeling nervous or stressed.
The Sea Lions enjoyed being scientists by exploring nature and experimenting with our new digital microscope. We took a walk around campus to find interesting items from nature, then recorded them in our journals and predicted what we thought they would look like under the microscope. On Friday, we looked at our items with the digital microscope, practiced getting the image into focus and taking pictures on the computer. One student suggested that we try shining a light from underneath the natural items and we were all very excited to see how that changed the way the image looked (particularly for the more translucent leaves).
Our class enjoys playing dodgeball with some of the Otter students during outside choice time. We also have been building paper airplanes and testing them outside. Some of the Sea Lions even built a giant airplane out of a large sheet of chart paper! These student engineers were finding it difficult to get the giant airplane to fly, so they are contemplating what sort of changes they need to make to the design.
We continue to grow closer as a community in our Sea Lions class! We are learning how to treat each other with respect and kindness, and practicing being patient with each other. It was another great week!
