Week 4 - Sea Lion Study
/Our past week was focused on learning all about sea lions and working together to write a collaborative book about these animals. We spent time researching sea lions by reading books from the library, looking up information online, and watching informative videos on the iPads. As a class we brainstormed which topics would be best to include in our sea lion book and then each student chose a topic (or two) to be in charge of writing. It was a joy for me to watch the Sea Lions class working as a team and helping each other–sharing facts they learned that belonged under other students’ topics, suggesting ideas to make our book even better, assisting others with spelling tricky words, and guiding classmates with typing and using the computer.
The Sea Lions had fun creating illustrations for our sea lion book. We used a few different tutorials to help us draw images of sea lions. We also used our watercolors to paint beautiful ocean backgrounds, and then we plan to glue our sea lion drawings onto those backgrounds. Some students are interested in finding photographs of real sea lions on the computer and adding those to our book pages as well. We still have some more work to do on our illustrations and on our written pages this next week, but we’re excited to see our collaborative book getting closer to being complete.
Our class loves Treasured Reading time! They have great stamina for reading independently and quietly the entire time. Three of the Sea Lions have started reading the same Harry Potter book, another student just finished re-reading Frindle (which was our previous class read-aloud book), and another is on the fourth book in a graphic novel series he started at the beginning of the year. We took some time to browse brochures from the public library and made a list of books that sound interesting. We’re excited to borrow some of these library books as soon as they’re ready.
We started a new read-aloud novel last week called Poppy. The Sea Lions already seem to really enjoy this adventure story! We continued our math lessons on place value, rounding, and working with numbers in the hundred thousands. At the end of the week, we finished that chapter in our math workbooks and celebrated by playing a fun review game on Friday. We’re working on staying focused during math time and challenging ourselves to grow our brains.
The Sea Lions love our daily outside choice times. They continue to invent fun games, use their imaginations, explore the nature around them, and exercise their bodies. We even got to watch a creative gymnastics show that Maple directed with some of the Otters.
