Shipwrecked Shelters

The purpose of this activity was to encourage creativity and teamwork. Each group was given the same exact materials and told that they had just been shipwrecked on an island and had to create a shelter. The materials included paper, a paper bag, crayons, glue, scissors, yarn, paper clips, straws, and pipe cleaners. It was so neat to see how different they turned out!
Eli, Alex, and Nathan created a sleeping bag, fishing hook, and torches to accompany their shelter.

Luke, Jake, and Trey created a secret code in their door and spears to hunt with.

Cameron, Jack B, and Michael evidently had a lot of electrical outlets on their island because they created a shelter that included a teleportation device and a scanner.

Aubrey, Sammie, and Kinsey named theirs the SAK shelter and created a fence.

Josie, Mikayla and Casey definitely were in survival mode. They included a campfire, berry bushes for food, a shed, and a straw that collects water for them to boil to make it drinkable.

Jack L, Hailey, and Ryan made their shelter 5 stories high to fit the entire class!

Think Tank- Impressionism

This was our last think tank of the year. We studied a type of art called Impressionism. The kids absolutely loved it! You can tell how much they enjoyed it by the number of kids who chose to do each activity. They got the chance to use different types of mediums in art, pastels, paint, markers, colored pencils, and crayons. I highlighted the artists Monet, Degas, Cassatt, Pissarro, and Renoir.
The two activities pictured here is to create a landscape postcard and experiment with crayon and watercolor together.

These two activities are writing a letter to a friend from the book Linnea's in Monet's Garden and draw scene of an athlete in motion.

This activity was an experiment with pointillism- did they like the way the dots looked better than brush strokes and why? The class was split on which style they liked better.

This activity had the kids choosing their favorite piece and recreating it. Most kids picked Monet's artwork to recreate. They also made genre scenes that were taken from an everyday activity.

We read about how in the beginning these artists were laughed at and nobody thought very much about their work. I asked the students to determine if this was right or wrong and why.

What an Egg-sperience!!!

We have had an amazing week! Here is a picture of our five baby chicks, which all by the way, have names! So here they are: Midnight is to the left of the feeder bowl, Sunshine is at the top of the picture, then Mohawk, then Little Stripe, and then Armstrong.
We decided to opt out of recess today and play with our baby chicks instead- here are Midnight and Mohawk thinking "I don't think we are in Kansas anymore!" They were excitedly exploring/pooping on our carpet. I nicknamed the chicks the "pooping machines."

Here is Alex with either Mohawk or Little Stripe- hard to tell from this angle.

Look at these smiles, priceless! Thai and Ian are having a blast with their chicks!

Here are Cameron, Jack B, Jake, and Trey with Little Stripe.

Look at these three chicks! Casey, Mikayla and Sammie and the animals of course!

How Egg-citing!!!

Monday and Tuesday have been very exciting days for us this week. Monday morning I heard peeping coming from our incubator. Our first egg was beginning to hatch. Below are the pictures of the process- we started with 6 eggs, when they were candled only 5 were still viable. Our first egg, the one pictured on the blog, hatched Monday and the other four hatched on Tuesday. After they hatch they are moved out of the incubator into the brooder box. Below is a picture of the four that were hatched when I left school today. I just got off the phone and found out that we are now the parents of quintuplets- all five eggs have hatched!!

An aerial view of our brooder box. All of the chicks are goldish brown with one black one with white tipped wings.

Diving into the Desert

We are studying different habitats in science. We started with the desert. We did two centers today dealing with sand. Yesterday we touched on sand dunes, today we delved more deeply into this concept. Today we learned about 4 specific types of dunes. The children got to try to create these dunes using sand and straws. It is hard to see but on the blue paper is an example of what these dunes look like and on the tan paper (written in blue) is how to make the dunes. Below are pictures of the kids hard at work! We learned new words today like windward side, leeward side, slumping, and saltation.

Here is our second center. This had more to do with the concept of weathering and erosion. The students used hand lens to look at a piece of sand paper. Then they had to rub a piece of smooth chalk on the sandpaper. By doing this, the sandpaper left rough scratches in the chalk which was meant to show how sand pelting rocks caused weathering and erosion. The kids had a blast with both centers!

Fun with Food Chains

We learned all about food chains and food webs. Children were asked to recreate a food chain. They were given the option of drawing it on a paper or using the "paper chains" to create their food chain. You can see which option was more popular!

On the left is Kinsey's food chain. It starts with the sun because all green plants need the sun to grow. Then moves on to the plant, fish, and eagle.
Below that is Ian's- he started with the sun, kelp, fish, penguin, seal, and great white shark.

Marshmallow Towers

We started our unit on measurement in math today. We talked about standard and metric and then did a fun activity. We had a competition to see who could build the tallest tower using 20 marshmallows and 15 toothpicks. Thai and Ian were our winners with a tower that was 3.5 inches high! After our activity we talked about ways that we could have done a better job. The students thought that bigger marshmallows and more toothpicks would have made a big difference. At the end of our measurement unit we will try this activity again with those changes and see how different our results are!