Week 28 - Gardening and Diorama Presentations
/This week we put the finishing touches on our Oregon native tribe dioramas and finished writing the notes for our presentations. We added labels to our Oregon topographic map to show where each of our tribes was traditionally located. We also took time to practice presenting our dioramas to each other and with one of our parent volunteers. By the time Wednesday rolled around, the Sea Lions were confident and ready to do their presentations for groups of the Otter students. I was so impressed with the students’ hard work, creativity, and speaking skills. They were poised, knowledgeable, and did a great job of teaching the younger students information about the Native American tribe they had researched.
Mr. Mark joined us and the Otters class one afternoon to teach about the six gardens in our Cedar Classroom: the meadow, the pollinator garden, the bioswale, the fern garden, the pond, and the roof garden. We learned about the types of native plants that are growing in these gardens, including camas and wapato. On another afternoon, Mr. Mark helped each of us plant additional native plants in our gardens.
On Friday, we were invited to join the Otters class for a gallery walk to look at students’ rock collections (as that class kicks off their geology unit of study). Some of the Sea Lions students also brought their own collections and we loved exploring and sharing these cool rocks with each other.
In math this week, we learned how to create line graphs and line plots, and how these graphs can help us visualize data and answer questions about the information. The Sea Lions worked with partners to come up with a question (such as “How many minutes do you read each day?”), gather data from classmates, and then graph that data on a line plot. We also enjoyed learning a new board game called “Tsuro” which helps strengthen our strategy and spatial reasoning skills. Finn was happy to receive a reply letter from his new pen pals in the Otters class. Just for fun, we created a paper chain to count down the days of school left in the year. We also worked as a team to put together the new art drying rack that was ordered for our classroom.
We were very excited to welcome a new student into our Sea Lions classroom this week! Ella attended the ELC in the past and has decided to rejoin our school for the remainder of this year. We’re happy to have another friend to add to our small group, and we enjoyed getting to know her better and showing her our class routines.
Below are additional pictures that Mr. Mark was kind enough to share from the diorama presentations.
