Weeks 24 and 25 - Native American Tribe Studies
/We’ve continued studying the Native American tribes from Oregon. We learned that Forest Grove is on land that was traditionally the home of the Atfalati tribe who were part of the larger Kalapuya peoples. We learned about what a land acknowledgement is and why it is important to give honor to those tribes whose land we live on, and we watched some videos of indigenous people throughout North America reading their own land acknowledgements. Then the Sea Lions worked together to write a class land acknowledgement listing what we love about this area, how we benefit from the land, and how we will honor and protect this land we all share. Henry taught us how to use the speech-to-text feature in Google Docs and the whole class loved taking turns contributing their ideas to the typed document. The Sea Lions also worked together to design our land acknowledgement into a beautiful poster with a photo of our Oregon map as the background. We have also been reading and listening to traditional tribal legends about A Man Called Raven, Salmon Boy, and how Coyote created Willamette Falls, and a story about how the local tribes here used to catch lamprey eels at those same waterfalls. We learned about some of the traditional art designs used by the Coast Salish tribes (in the Washington coast area) and created art pieces of ravens and salmon inspired by that art style.
Each Sea Lion student selected one of the indigenous tribes from Oregon to be in charge of researching. We have been reading about our individual tribes and learning about the climate and environment where they lived, the types of shelters they built, foods they ate, clothing they wore, and tools they used. At the end of this week we began creating dioramas that will show what we’ve learned about our tribes. We are finding that there are some interesting similarities between tribes that lived in similar environments, but a lot of differences for those tribes that lived in the dryer regions of eastern Oregon. The students have been finding creative ways to make models of their shelters and tools for their dioramas, and it’s been fun to watch them being engineers and trying new ideas.
In Math, we finished up our chapter on adding and subtracting fractions, and now we’ve started a new chapter where we’re learning how to multiply fractions by whole numbers. Ms. Susan was surprised that the students are finding the lessons on multiplying fractions easier than the lessons on adding/subtracting fractions. We will continue to practice simplifying fractions and converting improper fractions into mixed numbers (i.e. 3/9 = 1/3 and 14/5 = 2⅘) as we build on our ability to compute with fractions.
We have been finding more opportunities to take our learning outside while the weather has been so lovely. The Sea Lions enjoyed practicing their cursive letters in the sandbox out in our Cedar Classroom, and we held our most recent book club discussions as well as free-choice reading outside on the grass. The students continue to love playing a variety of tag games with the Otters, as well as enjoying imaginative play together. On Friday we enjoyed a trip to the library too.
Ms. Susan made a big shift in our daily schedule and how we are doing our work each day. The Sea Lions are learning to be more independent and responsible for managing their own work as we prepare for the higher grades. Our new process is to gather as a group for certain parts of the day, such as for Content time, our daily Math lessons, or introducing a new writing assignment, but then we have several blocks of time each day that students get to do independent work. At the beginning of the day we go over the list of expectations and work that needs to be completed that day. Then students have blocks of independent work time when they get to choose what they want to work on first, or whether they want to tackle each assignment a little bit at a time. We tested the system out for a few days the previous week, then Ms. Susan surveyed each student to see how they felt about it. Everyone seemed to like the new system and preferred having more choice when they complete their work throughout the day (with one or two students who didn’t have a preference either way). It’s been going well so far and really gives the Sea Lions a chance to have more control over their day and work in whatever way that is best for their unique learning strengths. This has also provided Ms. Susan with a greater ability to provide one-on-one math support to those students who benefit from it since not everyone is doing their math problems at the same time. We’ll continue to use this independent work schedule for the Sea Lions for the foreseeable future.
