Week 34 - Oregon Trail Travels and Wagon Art
/This week our wagon families finished shopping for supplies in Independence, MO, and logging all our purchases and food amounts on our tracking sheets (involving lots of addition and multiplication). Then we started our journey on the Oregon Trail. We crossed the Kansas River, went hunting and fishing for additional food resources, and arrived at Fort Kearny, NE. Each part of our journey requires us to roll the dice to see what happens to our wagon on the trail. Here are some of the situations our various families encountered: getting stuck in the mud and losing travel days, breaking a wagon wheel, an ox getting injured, finding an abandoned wagon with supplies to take, having great weather and traveling in fewer days, and more! We determined how much food our wagon families ate over the amount of days we traveled and had to subtract that from our totals. We also spent time learning about some of the challenges pioneers really faced during their journeys, reading actual journal entries, and learning about what Fort Kearny was like. The Sea Lion gathered around the campfire and wrote another entry in their trail journals to role-play as their pioneer character, describing what the journey has been like for their wagon family so far.
For an art activity, we drew covered wagons and now we are using oil pastels to color the background to look like a sunset on the prairie. We are learning and practicing how to make a gradient effect with the colors and blend them into one another.
Our math studies this week were focused on perimeter of rectangles. We practiced finding the missing side length when we have the total perimeter and one of the sides. We also used the geoboards to practice finding the perimeter of irregular rectangular shapes (and some Sea Lions created beautiful designs on the geoboards during our read-aloud time). Our final work with perimeter involved some tricky irregular rectangular shapes where some of the side lengths are missing and we had to visualize moving portions of the edges out to fill a larger rectangle. It’s hard to describe, but you should ask your Sea Lion to show you their latest math packet to see how hard they worked! We finished the week playing math games on Friday, and we each got to try a new game on the iPads called “Dragonbox Algebra.”
We enjoyed celebrating with Finn for his birthday this week too! We made him a card and wrote compliments and description words about him on the whiteboard. Ms. Megha joined us a few times and taught us about the Zones of Regulation. We brainstormed a list of ways we can manage our emotions and get back into a state where we’re ready to learn at school. We also had fun acting out some scenarios related to our emotions (followed by some other “just for fun” acting).
The majority of Sea Lions and Otters students have been spending Project Exploration time either sharing and discussing their Pokemon cards (lots of communication and compromising) or working on a production of “The Wizard of Oz.” This has been 100% student-led: planning, scripts, directing, acting, costumes, props, etc. They performed it for classmates and teachers on Wednesday, and we were all so impressed with how great they did that we offered them the option to perform the play for the rest of the ELC on the stage in Taylor Meade hall. They are excited for this opportunity and already started working on painting sets and gathering more props. The play will likely be performed on June 10th (we’re just waiting on confirmation that the stage is reserved for us). During outside choice time, students have been hunting for insects, making “food” in their tree-stump kitchen, engaging in imaginative play about superheroes, and organizing games of touch football. A few students even got to meet a sweet puppy who was on a walk through campus!
