Snap Circuits Explorations

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As of this week we have five froglets and several tadpoles that we are observing. The tiny froglets are magnificent climbers and hiders! They come out to eat fruit flies and occasionally climb, but mostly love to stay hidden. This Tuesday we had “Visit Day” where students had an opportunity to visit next year’s classroom. Our second graders went to visit the Sea Lion classroom and our first graders were fantastic leaders and tour guides for the Whales who will join our classroom as first graders next year. On Wednesday Isla’s dad, Mr. Andrew, came in to teach us about energy and circuits. We worked in partners to build circuits. Of course our young engineers had to do problem-solving when things did not go as expected. In no time, we had spinners flying through the classroom, light shows, and sound effects as students figured out some tricky circuits. Isla’s family donated several sets of snap circuits so that we can continue our explorations next week and in years to come! Yesterday Ms. Casey came in to teach Sleeping Queens to another small group of students. Today we had our final Friday Summit and enjoyed a snack picnic outside with our buddy families. We also said our good-byes to our preschool buddy readers today. This afternoon students spent time putting together their memory books. They did a fantastic job helping each other assemble books and marveling over some of their writing and projects from the year. I heard several students looking at writing from September and marveling over the words they didn’t know how to spell back then. A huge thank you to Ms. Casey for taking the time to help our 24 students assemble their memory books- it was a big job!

Fantastic Fun Run & Froglets

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We had a fantastic fun run last Thursday As a school community we raised over $5,500 for our arts and PE programming next year! A huge thank you to all our donors, parent volunteers, and Laura’s track team who made this event possible. Last week in math first graders continued to analyze data and display their data using graphs and charts. Second graders have been working on counting and making change. In writer’s workshop students are working on adding interesting details to their stories and on using self-editing and peer editing to make their stories better. They’ve been quite brave in sharing their works in progress with classmates and soliciting feedback to make their stories more interesting. We were delighted to discover three tadpoles that had developed into froglets and were ready to be transferred into our land terrarium. We also worked with Ms. Natalie to increase our social-emotional awareness and add to our introception tool box.

Story Problems and Kitchen Chemistry

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This week our young mathematicians dove deep into exploring story problems. We worked on creating representations of story problems, acting out the problems, and representing the problems using pictures and numbers. We discovered that there are a variety of types of story problems. The trickiest ones for most children are the story problems where the starting number or one of the addends is missing, instead of the problems where the total is missing. By imagining, acting out, and representing the problems, students are getting better at determining what a problem is asking and how to go about solving it. Students created their own story problems about classmates and other real life events too. We were working on math, writing, acting, and drawing all at the same time! We will continue working with story problems this year even as we move on to new math topics. First graders are beginning a mini unit on Using Data to Describe and Wonder. Yesterday they worked with partners to sort and classify different rocks. Next week they will figure out interesting ways to display their data. Second graders will begin a mini-unit on the Foundations of Multiplication next week. In our outdoor classroom this week we made some interesting discoveries that required a bit of detective work and research. We discovered hundreds of aphids on our lupine plants and watched a ladybug devouring those aphids. We also discovered some worker termites in an old stump. During unit studies we continued our exploration of matter and chemistry in the kitchen! We did a dancing raisin demonstration to discover what would happen when the carbonation gas in soda attached to the surfaces of raisins. The carbon dioxide bubbles acted like little flotation devices that increased the buoyancy of the raisins, causing them to rise to the surface. When they reached the surface, the carbon dioxide bubbles popped, releasing the carbon dioxide into the air. This caused the buoyancy of the raisins to decrease, which made them sink. And so it went on and on, making it appear as though our raisins were dancing. We also did some baking science where we observed chemical and physical changes as we made bread in a bag. For example, we noticed that when we left the yeast, sugar, flour, and water overnight, the yeast enzymes broke down the sugar, releasing carbon dioxide into the bag. This caused our bag to expand and fill with air. We discovered that the yeast in bread causes it to rise and makes it fluffy. We noticed little pockets of air in our bread loaves where the gas bubbles were. We also learned how to turn liquid heavy cream into a delicious solid- butter! We discoverd that science is all around us in the kitchen, and boy is it tasty! We ended our week together with some buddy reading time, a trip to the Pacific library, and some time in the sunshine.

Joyful Reflections

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It was a week of reflection and joyful celebration in the Otter classroom. We spent ample time looking through photos, art, and writing from throughout the year. Students had an opportunity to review their work, marvel over their growth, and select pieces to share with their families at our Spring Celebration of Learning! The engineering sandbox was hopping as young engineers grappled with bringing the ideas in their minds to fruition and struggled with reaching compromises when engineers had differing ideas. We are discovering time and time again that engineering is a tough but rewarding endeavor. In our frog aquarium we observed back legs on a couple of our larger tadpoles! This week our mathematicians were working on modeling tricky story problems and demonstrating their thinking through diagrams, equations, and words.