Week 27 - Dioramas and the Start of Spring
/The Sea Lions continued creating dioramas to show the shelters, foods, tools, etc. that were used by the Native American tribes from Oregon we’ve been researching. These awesome dioramas include so many intricate details and additions, and the students have loved spending lots of focused time and effort working on their projects! We are writing descriptions of our dioramas and then we’ll be presenting them to the Otter class this next week. We also continued learning more details about the Kalapuya peoples, which includes the Atfalati tribe who lived locally in our region of the Willamette Valley. Some of the interesting facts we learned were about how they harvested camas and wapato for food, as well as how they set controlled forest fires each fall to help the native plants grow better the next year.
This week we also began an online program of typing lessons. Each Sea Lion student has an assigned day every week to practice their keyboarding skills and to learn how to use the proper fingers for each key. The students have been loving these lessons and are eager to put in extra time on the computer anytime their other work is finished early.
In math, we’ve finished up our fraction chapters and will be moving on to a short study on graphs. We wrote response letters to our pen pal friends early in the week, had a visit from the university’s OT students (some of them showed us yoga moves), and enjoyed a visit to the library on Friday. For April Fool’s Day, the Otters teachers surprised us with a pan of “brown E’s” which gave us all a good laugh (followed by some real brownies they were kind enough to share with us).
We’ve been enjoying the warmer and sunnier weather lately. The trees are blooming, the birds are visiting our Cedar Classroom, and the bees are buzzing. We’ve learned that many of the indigenous tribes from Oregon used a mortar and pestle to grind their foods, so some students have been creating their own “mortars and pestles” using sticks and wooden bowls during our outside choice time. In preparation for planting some new plants with Mr. Mark next week, the Sea Lions learned about mulch and did a science experiment to discover which type of material would make the best mulch to help retain water in the soil. We made predictions and then recorded our observations and the results we found. It turned out that plastic wrap made the best mulch because it was less porous (compared to newspaper or paper towels), so less water could escape when it evaporated.
