Week 9 - A New Month and a New Unit
/We finished up October with so many festivities that heading into the new month of November felt like a fresh reset. Our Sea Lions class started the week off with the highlight of receiving our completed tie dye creations. They all turned out so beautiful and unique! Everyone was excited to wear their tie dyed item right away.
We wrote reflections about our favorite memories from the Fall Festival, and then added these pages to our Memory Books along with some fun photos from the day. The Sea Lions continued making progress on their written fiction stories, and two students published books and shared their finished stories with the class. We also spent time writing thank-you notes to helpful adults around the ELC and writing welcome back messages for Mr. Hayes.
We finished our chapter book read-aloud of Bunnicula and switched to our next novel: Poppy and Rye (the Sea Lions enjoyed me reading Poppy so much that they wanted to continue with the next book in the series).
For our math lessons, we practiced finding multiples of numbers, and learned about finding the common multiples of two numbers. This is laying the foundation for the future work we’ll be doing with adding and subtracting fractions. Along with the workbook lessons, we also spent time playing games that allowed us to practice the basic multiplication facts. The Sea Lions did a pre-assessment worksheet of multiplication problems (with factors from 0 to 10), and then re-did the same worksheet as a post-assessment after practicing. I was so impressed with how much progress and improvement these students made! Every Sea Lion improved by increasing their score, by completing a greater number of problems, or by being able to remember the multiplication facts with quicker automaticity.
We are adding book clubs to our Treasured Reading time, which will give the students opportunities to think more deeply about what they are reading and to discuss books with each other. The Sea Lions reviewed several options of novels and voted on which ones they are interested in. For this first book club round, we will all be reading and discussing the same novel: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. For future book club rounds, we will break into smaller groups to read other novels.
The Sea Lions have also begun taking trips to the public library. We joined the Otters class and had our first library visit on Friday. The students were so excited to browse the hundreds of book options and check out books based on their own interests. We’ll continue taking these short field trips every other week.
November also marked the start of a brand new unit of study. The Sea Lions will be studying Oregon biomes and learning about the different plants, animals, and climates found in each geographic region of our state. We began by using Google Earth to explore Oregon’s physical features. We located many of the main mountain ranges, rivers, and lakes in our state, and each student shared the physical features they found with the rest of the class so we could fill in our paper maps.
The Sea Lions continue to enjoy finger-knitting and measuring the long chains they create. They like to use it as a quiet, calming activity during read-alouds or when they finish learning activities early. The weather has been getting colder and it is often rainy, however the Sea Lions still like to play outside with the Otters during our free choice times. There have been dodgeball matches, imaginative play as fantasy characters, chess games, searching for bugs, and building forts.
