The Three Bears and Goldilocks

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Week 22 - Valentine’s Day and Our Class Play

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The Sea Lions had a busy and exciting week! We enjoyed a Valentine’s party with the Otters on Monday and loved exchanging cards with our classmates. On Wednesday, we celebrated the very first birthday of one of our Sea Lions. Maple got to bring in special items from home to show and share with the class, and we took turns writing compliments about her on the whiteboard. We also surprised her with a special birthday card everyone had written in.

We finished all the costumes, props, and background scenery for our play, and we continued rehearsing throughout the week. We also finished our ticket designs and Murphy created a digital poster to advertise our play. Thursday was the big day, and we put on four separate performances of “The Three Bears and Goldilocks” for each of the other ELC classes. The Sea Lions did a fantastic job! They were so proud to share their hard work with the audiences. In between performances, we even put on a silly version of the play with Henry playing “Goldiboy” and others taking on different roles. We had so much fun together and really enjoyed performing on a real stage in the auditorium.

We received our first batch of letters from our pen pals in Missouri too! The Sea Lions were excited to read their letters and learn a little bit about the students they’ve been paired with. We already found that we have some things in common with these other students, and we’re looking forward to writing our reply letters this week.

We’ve also been continuing to practice with fractions for our math work, reading chapters in our separate book club novels, solving logic puzzles and Sudoku puzzles, and learning the last lowercase letters in our cursive alphabet. We have been enjoying new games and materials to play with during Outside Choice time, and Ms. Ren has been teaching and leading us in some fun movement games too.

Week 21 - Play Rehearsals and Preparations

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This felt like a very full week as we’ve gone full swing into preparations for our class play. The Sea Lions worked hard to memorize their lines (some for more than one character) and we rehearsed the play several times each day. We learned about the importance of using a strong, clear voice so that our audience will be able to hear and understand our words, and we even rehearsed outside on campus to practice our strong voices. We also practiced using good emotion and acting skills as we presented our lines, and we enjoyed adding some extra lines and funny moments to our roles. For some of our rehearsals, one student recorded the performance using an iPad and then he worked on editing the video and adding interesting effects and text to it. We all enjoyed watching his cool video afterwards.

The Sea Lions have been diligently working on the set pieces, costumes, and props for our play each day. This has required a lot of teamwork, planning, and collaboration. The students have worked together to mix paint colors and find just the right hues for painting the house scenery, and they’ve come to each other for advice and suggestions on how to create complicated pieces such as a flying pig, headbands with bear ears, a 3-D tree and apples, and a turkey beak and tail feathers. We also wrote and designed tickets that we’ll pass out to the other ELC classes for them to come to the performances. We can’t wait for everyone to watch our play next week and see the amazing work we’ve done!

Our math lessons this week were focused around how to convert improper fractions into mixed numbers and vice versa. We used recipe ingredient measurements as a way to practice what we learned, and on Friday we got to put our learning into real-life as we baked some sugar cookies. Each student was in charge of an ingredient, but they only had a specific small measuring cup/spoon to use (ex. 1 ½ cups of sugar, but we only had a ¼ cup to measure with). This meant they had to determine the correct equivalent improper fraction so they would know how many ¼ cups to add to the mixture. We had fun decorating the cookies and we plan to share them with the Otters during our Valentine’s friendship party on Monday. We also played a memory matching game with improper fractions and equivalent mixed numbers.

The Sea Lions started their new book clubs this week. Two students are reading a novel called A Week in the Woods and three students are reading a novel called Class Dismissed. Each small group read the first few chapters in their books and then met to discuss the story so far. We finished a class read-aloud of the book Catwings and have started the sequel called Catwings Return. At lunchtime, the class has been enjoying an audiobook reading of Percy Jackson. We like finding new stories to enjoy and increase our love of reading!

Other fun activities from the week included… solving Sudoku puzzles and logic puzzles, finishing and mailing our pen pal letters, designing and decorating mailboxes for our Valentines exchange, making quills from feathers and writing with them using watercolor paint, playing chess with the Harry Potter set, creating obstacle courses, engineering and building, playing variations of tag and dodgeball, and other outdoor activities.

Week 20 - Painting our Sets + Pen Pal Letters

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After many days of missing our absent classmates, the Sea Lions were excited to finally all be back together in the classroom again by the end of the week. Our time was mainly spent working on preparations for our class play. We took turns typing up the script on the computer (practicing our keyboard skills), while other students finished editing their folktale stories. We learned which roles we will each act out in the play and took time to highlight our lines in the script. We worked as a team to finish painting the forest background scenery and also sketched the scenery for inside the Three Bears’ house. On Friday, we had a little time to begin creating some of the props and costume pieces we will need for the play. This next week, we’ll begin rehearsing our lines and acting out the play, and we will also paint the house background scenery.

The Sea Lions have started a Pen Pal Project! We have been partnered up with a small class of 5th and 6th graders from Springfield, Missouri. We had fun locating where their town is on the map, learning a little about how to write a letter, and brainstorming ideas of what we could write to someone to introduce ourselves. Each Sea Lion wrote letters to their two pen pals on Friday, and we’re excited to finish the envelopes and mail them off this week.

We continued our studies of fractions this week. We looked at geometric art and practiced splitting the shapes into equal units so that we could write fractions of how much of the art was represented by each different color. Then we practiced comparing fractions to determine which one is greater, using different methods to make equivalent fractions with numbers that would be easier to compare. The Sea Lions also enjoyed creating rulers with our own units of measurement. We gave our measuring units imaginative names (such as “boogles,” “dollas,” “roruros,” and “boonswaggles”) and filled in the rulers with all the fractions for each mark. This helped us learn about improper fractions (such as 5/3) and mixed numbers (such as 1 ⅔), as well as the infinite number of fractions that are possible. On Friday, we played a math game using shape blocks to help us recognize and write mixed number fractions.

We chose new novels for our next round of book clubs. This time we will be splitting into two small groups to read and discuss separate novels. The majority of the Sea Lions have been continuing to read the Harry Potter novels for their free-choice treasured reading time, and the students enjoy sharing their love of those stories and characters with each other. Our class took a trip to visit the public library and enjoyed a bit of extra space without the Otters there.

The Sea Lions and Otters have been gathering together each day to hold group discussions about social-emotional topics and challenges/behaviors we’re noticing in our interactions together. We’ve been brainstorming ways to be good leaders and role models for one another, ways to cooperate and play together better, and ways to be more inclusive and kind in our words and actions. During Outside Choice time, students have been working together to build obstacle courses and they’ve enjoyed racing around them and improving their agility. We’ve also been enjoying some new movement games that Ms. Ren has been teaching us.