Week 4 - Sea Lion Study

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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.

Week 3 - New Games and New Jobs

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This has been a very full week for the Sea Lions! We introduced our classroom jobs and students got to fill out a “job application” to explain which jobs they would be most interested in and why they would be a good fit for those jobs. We took a few days to test out some of the different job roles, and then students were “hired” to their jobs. We are practicing being responsible and setting an example as leaders in the classroom as we fulfill our job duties. For our morning Word Work each day, we rotated through time spent working on grammar/editing mistakes in Ms. Susan’s writing, learning new vocabulary words about sea lions, learning and practicing cursive letters, and sorting words based on their spelling patterns. These Sea Lions seem to really like being challenged with difficult spelling words to practice!

During Writer’s Workshop today, each author shared their first published book (or books for some) with the rest of the class. We practiced being kind, attentive audience members, as well as giving compliments and helpful suggestions to each author after they read their stories.

We continue reviewing the books in our classroom library. The Sea Lions have done a great job of looking through books to decide if they are a good fit to keep on the shelves. Each time we go through a group of books, there are always one or two titles that catch a Sea Lion’s attention and get them excited to continue reading the whole book later. We like to take time to read independently from books of our choice too. Ms. Susan has been meeting with each student to listen to them read, so now she will be able to help them choose chapter books that will be a “just right” challenge for them.

We all love using our microscopes to get a closer look at the things we find around us. The Sea Lions explored looking at more items for nature, along with a strand of their hair, a ripped edge of paper, and other items from inside the classroom. We noticed some mushrooms growing in the grass outside, so we brought one in to investigate under the microscope. When we broke open the stem, we found that there were some strange white larvae creatures crawling out of the mushroom. It was an exciting discovery!

This week, we began a new unit to study sea lions. We have been building a list of questions we have about these animals, and we continue to add facts to the list each day as we learn new information. We read a book about seals, sea lions, and walruses and learned how they are all part of a group of animals called pinnipeds. We’ll keep researching more details about sea lions and then we plan to create a collaborative class book about them.

The Sea Lions worked really hard this week on their math lessons. We are practicing comparing large numbers up to the hundred thousands and learning how to round the numbers to different place values. Students are doing a great job of being willing to challenge themselves with their own personal level of work that will help stretch and grow their brains. We celebrated our hard work by spending Friday playing a variety of math games, which helped us review and solidify what we’ve learned as well as made math time fun!

We learned a new movement game this week called “Captain’s Orders.” We have really enjoyed playing this game during our brain breaks. You could ask your Sea Lion to show you how it’s played and see if they remember some of the movement commands. Several Sea Lions also spent most of the week playing the game of “Life” during our afternoon Project Exploration time. We continue to enjoy our outside choice time too. This week included some interesting zombie tag games, opening a pretend “massage shop”, and Henry showing the younger Otter students how to create a volcano with the sand and water pump. The Sea Lions seem to be building some nice friendships with our Otter friends, and we are so glad we get to expand our community to include them too.

Week 2 - Brain Study and Using our Microscope

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The Sea Lions are starting to get more into the swing of our routines and daily learning activities. This week we began learning how to write in cursive, which we will continue working on regularly, and we are starting to spend some time each week practicing spelling and learning new vocabulary. The class continues to enjoy their time to write freely during Writer’s Workshop. Our budding authors are writing stories in a variety of styles: personal info booklets, fictional diaries, graphic novels, and imaginative fantasy stories. It has been fun reading what they add to their stories each day! For math this week, we began learning about place value for numbers up to the 100,000s.

In addition to free-choice independent reading each day, we have been working on improving and simplifying our classroom library organization. The Sea Lions classroom inherited a bunch of books from some retiring teachers, so we are now working as a team to go through the books and vote on whether they are good quality, appropriate for 3rd-4th grade, and interesting to the students. Through this process, we also learned about different genres and discussed what types of qualities make a good book. The Sea Lions have been enjoying taking ownership and having a say in which books get to be part of our library.

We have been learning about our brains and how we process information through the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. Students learned about the roles these parts of the brain play, and we brainstormed ways we can help calm our minds down when we are feeling nervous or stressed.

The Sea Lions enjoyed being scientists by exploring nature and experimenting with our new digital microscope. We took a walk around campus to find interesting items from nature, then recorded them in our journals and predicted what we thought they would look like under the microscope. On Friday, we looked at our items with the digital microscope, practiced getting the image into focus and taking pictures on the computer. One student suggested that we try shining a light from underneath the natural items and we were all very excited to see how that changed the way the image looked (particularly for the more translucent leaves).

Our class enjoys playing dodgeball with some of the Otter students during outside choice time. We also have been building paper airplanes and testing them outside. Some of the Sea Lions even built a giant airplane out of a large sheet of chart paper! These student engineers were finding it difficult to get the giant airplane to fly, so they are contemplating what sort of changes they need to make to the design.

We continue to grow closer as a community in our Sea Lions class! We are learning how to treat each other with respect and kindness, and practicing being patient with each other. It was another great week!

Off to a Great Start!

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The Sea Lions had a fantastic first week of school. Our first few days of school were focused on getting to know each other and building a sense of community in our classroom. We filled out “All About Me” sheets, shared details about ourselves in our group meetings, memorized each other’s names, and even practiced spelling our classmate’s names.

On Thursday and Friday, we did partner interviews to learn more about each other and practiced our note-taking skills. Then we took our time designing artistic name tags for our classmates, focusing on including the colors and pictures that they would love the most. We’re excited to hang these up in our classroom and start adding more art to our walls.

The Sea Lions have also been enjoying the different math and engineering activities we’ve done. We worked on making graphs and comparing data (based on class poll questions), thinking about how to complete number patterns, and making a variety of mathematical equations to equal a target number. Today, some of the Sea Lions had fun learning how to solve Sudoku puzzles. Our favorite engineering challenge was to see how long of a paper chain each partner group could create out of a single sheet of paper. After learning about the different methods that worked best, the Sea Lions wanted to combine their chains into one long chain, so we used our measuring skills to determine how long it is in inches, centimeters, and feet. It turns out that the big class paper chain is as long as 4 Sea Lion students!

Today, we started writing stories during Writer’s Workshop. We loved it so much that the Sea Lions didn’t want to stop when it was time to go outside for our snack break. They were happy to keep writing even longer and several students chose to continue writing during our free choice project time.

We’ve been working as a community to make group decisions about our classroom routines, values/expectations, seating arrangements, and more. We even voted on names for our special sea lion friends: Say hello to our class mascots, Floof and Lilly!

The Sea Lions enjoy spending time with the Otter class each day during lunch and outside choice time. They have been building waterways, playing freeze tag, playing dodgeball, and lots more. I can see them developing friendships and learning lots about how to interact with each other kindly.

It has been a fun-filled and busy week! We can’t wait to see what else lies ahead as we keep learning together.