Week 23 - Celebration Party and Beginning a New Unit
/This week the Sea Lions got to enjoy an Authors Celebration/Cast Party to commemorate all our hard work writing our folktale stories and putting on our class play! The students took turns reading some of the published folktales they previously wrote. We gave toasts and cheers for our hard work with sparkling apple cider, then we ate popcorn and watched the video recordings of our play performances (including part of the silly version we did with “Goldiboy” and other mixed-up roles). We finished the celebration by taking turns running through the painted paper scenery from our play, and the Sea Lions had so much fun tearing it apart.
We wrote letters to our pen pals in Missouri and practiced responding to the questions we were being asked as well as thinking of new questions or additional responses to share with them. Some students got the opportunity to type their letters on the computer and they learned how to use the speech-to-text feature. We also took time to update our Memory Books, adding in some mementos from fun math activities, pictures from Valentines Day, and reflection writing, pictures, and tickets from our class play.
This week we began a new unit of study focused on the Native American tribes that traditionally lived in Oregon. We learned about the concept of how Indigeous Peoples have lived on our continents since “time immemorial,” we read some of the origin legends from several native tribes, and we also learned about the current scientific theory of how a land bridge between Asia and present day Alaska led to people crossing over to this continent around 14,000 years ago. The Sea Lions also explored digital maps (we visited https://native-land.ca/ and https://www.whose.land/en/#) on the iPads to discover which Native American tribes lived in the various regions of Oregon. It was interesting to see how the different regions we studied during our Oregon geography unit tend to match up with areas where different tribes settled. We’ll continue learning more about the specific ways these tribes used the natural resources of their regions to live and thrive in Oregon.
Ms. Susan read the class a book about Rosa Parks and we were able to discuss more about her courageous act. We learned how her arrest inspired the bus boycotts, which led to changes in the legislation of our country. This week we also began a new read-aloud novel called The Birchbark House, which is centered around the life of a young Native American girl from the Ojibwa tribe living on an island in Lake Superior in 1847. We continued reading chapters for our book clubs, and also enjoyed free-choice reading and a visit to the library.
In math, we are continuing to practice with adding and subtracting fractions. We also had a visit from Ms. Ren who led us in an exploration of number palindromes. We used a number chart (up to 100) to mark numbers that are already palindromes, as well as those that are 1-step palindromes, 2-step palindromes, 3-step and so on. We played with the number 98 and found that it still had not created a palindrome number even after 15 steps of adding the reverse!
Even though it was a cold week, we enjoyed Outside Choice time with the Otters, ate birthday popsicles, and learned a fun new game called “Mousetrap” with Ms. Ren.
