Thursday, April 19, 2012

Seals, Sharks, Whales...Oh My!

Dear Family,

This week was an exciting one! We started the week welcoming back one of our dear friends, Wadi. Wadi has been learning from home because last year, he was diagnosed with cancer. He is such a brave guy and we have missed him so much. We had a very special speaker come visit us and explain exactly what Wadi has been through with his treatement. She brought a special doll to show us and we got to watch a Charlie Brown video as well.




With the end of March, we hung up our "March Words".



Then, we brainstormed some "April Words" for this great month! We use these words to help us get ideas for writing topics during our independent writing time during Writer's Workshop. We can use these ideas to write poems, stories, nonfiction pieces, letters, and even lists! We always start with a read aloud to get our ideas going. Here is the silly story we read for this month:





This week, we had more published authors who shared their published books with us.


We always remember to show our great illustrations!






We have finished studying media in our Reader's Circle. We have explored and investigated magazines, newspapers, radio programs, websites, television, and advertisements. We have discovered the different purposes of each as well as their special characterisitics. Ask me what my favorite form of media was! Now we will begin our research so that we can begin our next project: writing an expository piece on a topic we want to learn more about.

Just a few of the large charts we completed after we completed our own charts by exploring and investigating each form of media.



We have completed our unit on fractions and sets. Here is a poster we created to hang on our "math line" so we can continue to work on this objective on our Math Attacks and Quick Checks that we do each day during Math. Being mathematicians is a lot of work!



In Science, we have been studying interdependence and how living things depend on one another, espeically for survival. Each table drew a card with a word written on it. We worked together to create this object on our papers. Then, we talked about how these things were all connected, how each depended on the other. Look at what we created - a food chain!

Working together to create our posters.

Putting our heads together...


Look how they are all connected!


The next day, we planned a dinner party! We each drew a different guest card. These were no ordinary guests...we had frogs, lions, fish, birds...oh my! We then had to plan a meal for them and create it on our dinner plates. We even used PebbleGo and Google Kids to research what we could serve out guests. It was fun going around and visiting all of hte dinner parties to see what everyone had planned for dinner!






We read a literary nonfiction piece about how interdependence occurs in the ocean.


We created a graphic organizer of the food chain that was in the story.







Then, we worked with our groups to research different food chains. We created a plan and then made "stacking cups" of our food chains.





We then presented them to the class.









We had fun practicing with each other's stacking cups to see if we could put the food chains in the correct order!

What a terrific week!

Love,
Tiger Team