Weeks 11 and 12 - Oregon Topographic Map
/The main focus of our past two weeks together has been on building our topographic map of Oregon. Students worked together as a team each day to create a map out of salt dough. They covered the entire outline of Oregon, then added thicker layers to match the areas with higher elevations in our state. Next, they worked on adding all the different mountain ranges that we had previously explored using Google Earth. Finally, the students marked the paths of a few main rivers and lakes. Now we will wait for the dough to completely dry and then it will be ready for the students to paint. The Sea Lions have been taking a lot of ownership, pride, and excitement in their map building project. It has been an opportunity for them to practice reading and understanding maps, but also to work on their cooperation and communication skills. They worked through any disagreements, took turns on different parts of the project, and delegated responsibilities to make sure everyone had something to do.
We started researching information about the various geographic regions in Oregon. Each student read from printouts and web pages about their assigned region, and then took notes about the climate and physical features of that region. We’ll be sharing what we learned with the rest of the class so that we can all combine our new knowledge together.
Many of the Sea Lions finished their fiction stories and they got to share these with their classmates. We use this as an opportunity to celebrate their hard work, to practice being polite audience members, and to practice giving compliments as well as constructive feedback to each other. During Thanksgiving week, we spent our Writer’s Workshop time reviewing the conventions for greeting and closing letters, and then we wrote special thank you cards to give to some of the people in our lives that we are grateful for (including parents, other relatives, past teachers, and friends).
For math time, we’ve been working on learning about prime and composite numbers as well as finding the greatest common factor of two numbers. We also had a visit from Ms. Ren, who led the students in investigating an interesting math phenomenon of two-digit numbers (see the problem on page 32 of this link).
We’ve continued reading chapters in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and we held our first few book club group discussions. The students each took on a particular role for the book club (such as directing the discussion, summarizing the chapter, defining tricky vocabulary words, etc) and they all fulfilled their responsibilities well. We’ll be rotating roles so that they get a chance to try the different jobs. The Sea Lions enjoy pushing the tables together to hold the discussion in a cozy group setting.
The Sea Lions took another trip to the library and they were excited to check out new books to enjoy. We also continue to love joining the Otters for our afternoon Project Exploration time, where the students have been engineering structures with the Rigamajig, making and experimenting with slime, working on art projects, exploring a new engineering/programming tool called Turing Tumble, and more. Outside Choice time has included art auctions, dodgeball games (the latest challenge has been the Sea Lions class against the Otters!), and lots of imaginative play.
