Introducing...

Wilmington Willie



That's the name we selected for our class groundhog for Project Groundhog. He definitely saw his shadow this afternoon. We had a great time finding all of our shadows and learning about groundhogs this week! Here were our predictions from Wednesday.

We were pretty good prognosticators. :-) We have been learning lots about groundhogs with Ms. Herron. She took over Science this week. Here is a sample of what we created after learning more about groundhogs, aka woodchucks, aka whistle pigs and their burrows.


Today we predicted whether or not we would see our own shadow if we went outside. We discussed how the weather conditions have a lot to do with shadows. Then we went outside to check our predictions. We were right! We knew that if the sun was shining and we were able to block the sunlight from the ground, we would have a shadow. When we came back inside we drew what we observed. We determined that we needed to add a sun to our picture because no sun = no shadow.


We watched the traditional groundhog ceremony from Gobblers Knob to see Punxatawny Phil make his annual prediction. The anticipation of the kids waiting to see the most famous groundhog of all was so much fun. They loved him! We were not as thrilled with his prediction, but we talked about how he would have had the same prediction here-6 more weeks of winter. Now we are going to be checking his accuracy for the next 6 weeks and reporting back to our team each week via email. Our team for Project Groundhog consists of 2 classrooms from New York, 1 from New Jersey, 1 from Texas, and 1 from the other side of NC! We can't wait to compare our groundhog predictions. Each day, during our calendar routine, we will record sky conditions and temperature to see if it really is more like winter or if we got an early spring. So far we have definitely been more spring like. It was 72 degrees today!

Click on the groundhog link below if you want to check out the video

We went outside for math to trace our shadows and measure their length. We used our feet to measure the length. The coolest part was when our shadows suddenly disappeared when a cloud came over the sun. They completely vanished! It was a great reinforcement to what we were learning about how light causes shadows.

Penguins

What a long week! We had so much going on with finishing Dibels and getting report cards done. Ms. Schiffer was out all week (congrats to her son on his graduation!). We sure did miss her. I apologize for the poor quality of some of the pictures. I was snapping quickly when I got a chance. I am so upset that I did not take any photos of the books we worked on in writing all week. They turned out so good! I think I was just as excited as they were to take them home and share with their families. The kids have really loved working with nonfiction stories this week. We created this chart to show all of the text features found in nonfiction books.

I loved hearing them say "look this one has a table of contents" or "I found a glossary". I felt like a proud mama. :-) I put together some browsing boxes full of a variety of nonfiction books for the kids to explore as they came in to the class in the morning or if they finished work early. They had given me a list of topics they were interested in learning more about and I checked out as many books from the library as I could.

Our unit is on Polar Animals. We started by learning about the Poles (North and South). We were so surprised to learn that a polar bear and penguin would probably never meet unless at the zoo. We could not believe that it gets so cold at the South Pole that metal could snap! We made a connection to our learning about animals in winter last week. We talked about how some animals adapt to colder weather last week. That is just what polar animals do. They have adapted to live in extreme cold. Some migrate as well.

This week we focused mainly on penguins. We created a schema chart to record what we already knew about penguins and to keep up with what we have learned. We read lots of NF on penguins and we practiced picking out key details to add to our chart as new learning or to attach to our prior knowledge (schema). In writing, we made our own NF books about penguins-complete with a table of contents. Many of the activities I used for penguins came from a unit from Deanna Jump. Love all of her stuff! Wish I had pictures to share because the kids really did an amazing job! I do have a photo of our tree map that we created to help us write our sentences. We had lots of questions about penguins and how they stay warm. We used the scientific method to find answers to those questions. First, we read in one of our books that it gets so warm in the middle of a penguin huddle, they have to move to the back to cool off. We couldn't believe that they could get hot in 100 below 0 weather. We made some predictions (hyposthesis) about how it happens and then decided to try a huddle of our own outside.

Here's our little penguins all huddled together. We concluded that being huddled closely together helps to block the wind. If we stood close enough together we could trap the warm air and keep the cool air out. Pretty amazing! We also wondered how having oily feathers could help keep them warm. We had a few interesting ideas (acted like a coat) so we decided to give that one a try. We coated our hand with petroleum jelly and placed it in ice cold water. We observed that the water would bubble up on our hand and roll off. Our hand felt dry. We determined that the oil helps keep their feathers dry. We all know that we feel colder when we are wet. So by staying dry the penguins can stay warm.

In math, we started our unit on measurment. We focused on height this week. Our penguin friends helped us out. We really had to work hard at using the words "taller" and "shorter" (not just saying "bigger" and "smaller"). We compared our height to that of an Emperor penguin. First, we predicted whether we would be taller, shorter, or the same height. Then, we compared and graphed.

We traced our foot to make a penguin. We took our penguins around the room and compared his height to other objects.


We did take a break from NF to read a fiction story about Tacky the penguin. We LOVED him! We talked about how this story was different from all of the others we had been reading. We created a character map for Tacky. I used the data projector/doc camera to show the kids how to draw Tacky. We came up with a list of adjectives to describe him. We had to use examples from the story to support our thinking. Here are some of our creations.

On Friday, we made a special penguin snack. We had to read and follow the recipe to make our own. It was not as easy as we thought to break the Oreos. They were cute and yummy in the end though!

We also took a virtual field trip to 2 aquariums across the country to observe penguins. You can check them out at home! Just click on the links below to visit the websites!

Project Groundhog

I just signed our class up to participate in Project Groundhog!!! This will be my first experience with this project. I am kinda excited about this and looking forward to having our class communicate with other classes throughout the United States. Click on the picture below to go to the website and learn more. Parents-look for a letter with some additional information this week!

Snowman projects

Here's a peek at some of our snowman projects! These were a family project for the students to complete after hearing the story Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.

Enjoy! We had a great time sharing them!

Now if we could only build some real ones....

Bears, hedgehogs, and hens...Oh my!

What an exciting week! We were focused on one of my favorite authors/illustrators...Jan Brett. We shared many of her stories this week and looked at the many unique characteristics of her writing/drawing. We created this anchor chart to store all of the new information we were learning about her.

Of course one of the first stories we shared this week was The Mitten. We created this story chart to retell the characters, setting, main events, and author's purpose. The author's purpose was a new one for us, but I thought it would help us next week as we begin to explore nonfiction texts. I thought it was a great grounding point for learning why we need the different texts. We discussed how some authors want to teach us something, some want to change our mind or convince of us something, and some just want us to have fun.

We made mittens with all of the characters to help us practice retelling a story with LOTS of detail and in correct sequence. We read several more of her stories that include Hedgie the hedgehog. Some of the books are pictured below.

We visited Jan Brett's website and watched her video tutorial on how to draw a hedgehog. I had the students follow along on their white boards. We took our new learning to our seats and wrote about Hedgie in our journals. I have such amazing artists!!! You should give it a try http://www.janbrettvideos.com/how_to_draw_a_hedgehog_high_bandwidth.htm!! She has lots more!

We made Hedgie with his accidental hat after reading The Hat. We compared The Mitten and The Hat by creating a venn diagram.

We visualized our perfect pair of mittens and created a bubble map to describe them. We decorated a pair of mittens to match our mental image and hung them out to dry. The next day when we went to get them to write about them, they were gone!!! We felt just like the Three Little Kittens. We decided to create "lost" posters using our bubble maps to help describe the lost mitten. We have our posters displayed in the hallway. Hopefully our mittens will be returned.

All week long we have been talking about how animals handle winter. We learned that they have three choices: to hibernate, to migrate, or to adapt (as we do). We learned which animals do each. Here you can see some hibernators peeking out of their warm dens. We discovered that animals do what they have to to find food and stay warm. A big "a-ha" for us was that geese are not the only animals that move or migrate to warmer temperatures. Whales and reindeer are also migrators. Animals can adapt by growing thicker coats of fur, storing food, changing their diet, or even changing the color of their fur to white. We made bird feeders to help out some of our feathered friends.

Here is our special snack: a bear track in the snow!

Frosty Fun

We did lots of learning with the help of snowmen this week. Here is a brace map we completed after reading an emergent reader about a snowman.

Here are a few student samples. I have such wonderful artists!

We've been working with the poem Five Little Snowmen in Math. We focused on ordinal numbers first-fifth. We made a flip book to practice counting, identifying, and writing those. ordinal numbers.

We've also been working with pattern block shapes. We used them to make a pattern for a snowman's scarf (from Julie Lee's blog) http://mrsleeskinderkids.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-01-22T21%3A33%3A00-06%3A00&max-results=10)

We read There Was A Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow and created a flow map to help us retell the story. Swallowing snow did not sound too strange-we've all done that, but in true Old Lady fashion she went a little crazy after that.

We've been working a lot with story elements (characters, setting, problem, and solution). We read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keatts and created a map for Peter. We listed all of the things Peter did in the story. Then, we used this map to make text-self connections. We looked for ways we could connect to Peter and wrote about them.


We learned a lot about snow and ice during this unit. We talked about how snow/ice is water in a solid form. We talked about how snow/ice can change. We all already knew that snow/ice melt when heat is applied. We did a little experiment to see who could devise a plan to melt ice the fastest. The students were given one ice cube in a zip-loc bag. They could use anything I had in the room to try to melt their cube. We stated our question and recorded our hypothesis. Next, we tried them out and recorded our observations. The kids had some great ideas. Some tried to hold their ice cube under the light, some sat on them, a few laid down on them, several kept stepping on them. We clarified the difference between breaking the ice cube into small pieces and actually changing the state of the ice cube from solid to liquid (water). One student went over the the sink and added warm water to her bag, and her cube melted first. We made some predictions as to why that worked the quickest. We also learned how we can generate heat with our hands and breathe. We tried those new techniques to melt the rest of the ice cubes. We made pictures of snowmen melting under the warmth of the sun (got this idea from Chalk Talk).


To finish out the week we made a melting snowman snack!

Next week we will be learning about how animals handle winter changes.