Week 21 - Play Rehearsals and Preparations
/This felt like a very full week as we’ve gone full swing into preparations for our class play. The Sea Lions worked hard to memorize their lines (some for more than one character) and we rehearsed the play several times each day. We learned about the importance of using a strong, clear voice so that our audience will be able to hear and understand our words, and we even rehearsed outside on campus to practice our strong voices. We also practiced using good emotion and acting skills as we presented our lines, and we enjoyed adding some extra lines and funny moments to our roles. For some of our rehearsals, one student recorded the performance using an iPad and then he worked on editing the video and adding interesting effects and text to it. We all enjoyed watching his cool video afterwards.
The Sea Lions have been diligently working on the set pieces, costumes, and props for our play each day. This has required a lot of teamwork, planning, and collaboration. The students have worked together to mix paint colors and find just the right hues for painting the house scenery, and they’ve come to each other for advice and suggestions on how to create complicated pieces such as a flying pig, headbands with bear ears, a 3-D tree and apples, and a turkey beak and tail feathers. We also wrote and designed tickets that we’ll pass out to the other ELC classes for them to come to the performances. We can’t wait for everyone to watch our play next week and see the amazing work we’ve done!
Our math lessons this week were focused around how to convert improper fractions into mixed numbers and vice versa. We used recipe ingredient measurements as a way to practice what we learned, and on Friday we got to put our learning into real-life as we baked some sugar cookies. Each student was in charge of an ingredient, but they only had a specific small measuring cup/spoon to use (ex. 1 ½ cups of sugar, but we only had a ¼ cup to measure with). This meant they had to determine the correct equivalent improper fraction so they would know how many ¼ cups to add to the mixture. We had fun decorating the cookies and we plan to share them with the Otters during our Valentine’s friendship party on Monday. We also played a memory matching game with improper fractions and equivalent mixed numbers.
The Sea Lions started their new book clubs this week. Two students are reading a novel called A Week in the Woods and three students are reading a novel called Class Dismissed. Each small group read the first few chapters in their books and then met to discuss the story so far. We finished a class read-aloud of the book Catwings and have started the sequel called Catwings Return. At lunchtime, the class has been enjoying an audiobook reading of Percy Jackson. We like finding new stories to enjoy and increase our love of reading!
Other fun activities from the week included… solving Sudoku puzzles and logic puzzles, finishing and mailing our pen pal letters, designing and decorating mailboxes for our Valentines exchange, making quills from feathers and writing with them using watercolor paint, playing chess with the Harry Potter set, creating obstacle courses, engineering and building, playing variations of tag and dodgeball, and other outdoor activities.
