Week 33 - Beginning the Oregon Trail
/This last week we finished up our studies of the Corps of Discovery and then made connections to how the Lewis and Clark Expedition led to the westward expansion of settlers across the United States via the Oregon Trail. We began a new unit about the Oregon Trail that will include a role-playing simulation where each Sea Lion is in charge of their own wagon, supplies, and choices as we journey from Independence, Missouri to Oregon. The students enjoyed creating their own characters with unique pioneer names, and planning what other family members are part of their wagon (with names, ages, and relationships). They have determined what occupation their wagon leader had and created a backstory for their characters to explain where they are coming from and why they want to move west. We created new journals for reflecting on our Oregon Trail journey, and wrote our first entry that is all about our characters, families, and backstories. We also learned about covered wagons and oxen, and then we measured out the size of a covered wagon and taped an outline of it in our classroom. Since we’ve been learning how to find the area of rectangles in our math lessons, we practiced our new skill and determined that the area of the wagon bed was 40 square feet. Some of us were able to extend that concept into solving the volume of the wagon as well. We started planning out the supplies we need to purchase for our journey and fitting those into our family’s budget. We’ll continue shopping for supplies this next week and then begin traveling to our first stop on the Oregon Trail.
The Sea Lions finished writing and editing their opinion essays this week, and on Friday we took some time to read them out loud to the rest of the class. One of our book club groups finished reading their novel, Class Dismissed, and they had their final group discussion and got to fill out book review sheets to share what they liked about the story. We spent the week learning about area of rectangles and practicing finding the area of irregular shapes as well (by breaking them into smaller rectangles and adding the areas of each one together). We had fun using the geoboards to create shapes and then challenging classmates to solve the area of those shapes. Next week, we’ll work on finding the perimeter of irregular shapes.
Our resident Occupational Therapy guru, Ms. Megha, joined us on Thursday to show the Sea Lions some fun games and activities that will strengthen their fine motor skills. Students have been enjoying the sunshine outside, playing badminton, learning touch football, “baking” mud treats, and playing imaginative games with the Otters. A group of Sea Lion and Otter students have started planning and directing their own play version of “The Wizard of Oz” during Project Explorations, and other students developed a new interest in Pokemon cards. We are all getting excited as we count down to the end of the school year, but we’re still enjoying all the fun learning and explorations we get to do together.
