Outdoor Classroom Explorations

/

We spent many hours outside exploring our outdoor classroom this week. Our outdoor classroom has six gardens filled with a variety of native plant species. We were especially thrilled to discover that the mason bees have been busy in our meadow garden. We observed them flying around the meadow, pollinating flowers, laying eggs, and building mud walls around their eggs. The mason bees have a wooden home attached to the gazebo so that we can closely observe and marvel at their daily activity. Earlier this week students played a version of bingo that involved finding 16 specific plants around our outdoor classroom. We are learning the names and characteristics of many of these plants.  We’ve also been spending quiet, meditative time in our outdoor classroom. Today we examined different types of nature journals before students had an opportunity to find their own quiet area in our outdoor classroom to listen, observe, sketch, and create their own nature journal entry. We will return to our nature journals each day next week. Inside our classroom we have a new enclosure with three praying mantis oothecae (egg sacs). This week praying mantis nymphs emerged from two of the oothecae. There are now dozens of praying mantis nymphs for us to observe in our classroom. They’ve been feasting on tiny fruit flies. Our painted lady butterflies have remained in their chrysalises all week. Occasionally we noticed the chrysalises shaking. We are expecting them to emerge sometime next week. Today we also visited the Taylor Meade Auditorium to watch a mariachi band and dancer perform. 

Cedar Tower Explorations

/

Students were delighted to get to play on the new Cedar Tower structure this week during outside times. The tower structure has multiple entrance points and provides a cool view of the garden roof of our gazebo. Students have enjoyed scaling the climbing net, swinging from the monkey bars, and creating structures in the covered tunnel area. While rain did not hamper our enjoyment of the new structure, it put a pause on some of our planting projects. We originally planned to begin sketching and researching the plants in our cedar classroom and planting in our gardens this week. In addition, Mark was planning to come give a tree climbing demonstration. These projects have been postponed until next week. Instead, this week we've been carefully observing our plant seeds and exploring NSTA’s digital book Peeking Inside Plants. Through this interactive book we learned that plants use water, sunlight, and air to make their own food in a process called photosynthesis. We learned that plants use some of this food to grow and they store the rest of it. We will continue learning about plants next week. This week we noticed that all of our painted lady caterpillars have now formed their chrysalises. In addition, we began learning how to play chess. We read a book called Story Time Chess that described an imaginative background story behind each different chess piece. The background stories described how each chess piece moves and why it moves that way. Now that we've learned about all the different chess pieces, we are excited to begin playing chess during project time.

Food Chemistry & Plant Guest Speaker

/

This week we wrapped up our States of Matter & Chemistry unit with some fun food science activities. We mixed a variety of solid and liquid ingredients to bake rolls. The yeast in the bread created gas, which left air pockets in our fluffy dinner rolls. We also made butter by vigorously shaking heavy cream until the fat molecules clumped together to form butter for our rolls- yum! Students created posters of things that are not considered matter and presented these posters to the class. Some examples of things that are not considered matter are memories, light, heat, rainbows, shadows, reflections, thoughts, and feelings. On Thursday morning Pierce's mom came in to share her vast knowledge of plants with us! She brought in many different types of plants for us to examine, observe, and care for throughout our upcoming plant unit. We discussed how different plants have different needs and require varying amounts of sunlight. Rachel brought in many plants, including succulents, aloe vera, pitcher plants, a rock plant, a thanksgiving cactus, and a venus fly trap, amongst others. She also brought in tickle me plant seeds for students to plant. Next week we’ll start learning about the native plants growing in our cedar classroom and around the Pacific northwest. Throughout our plant unit we will be comparing and contrasting native and nonnative plants and what different plants need to survive. We will also be learning to identify several types of native plants and will be researching the plants in our outdoor classroom. We are so excited about this upcoming unit! In writer's workshop this week students created writing and art pieces depicting our favorite parts of our outdoor classroom. We shared these art and writing pieces with the Brim family, whose generous donations helped build the Brim Family Outdoor Learning Center. On Monday one of our literacy volunteers, Ms. Robin, led us in creating a Kandinsky-inspired collaborative art piece. This week Ava B. also brought in caterpillars for us to raise. Our classroom is teeming with life! Other highlights of the week included time reading with our buddies and examining the insides of a digital camera at our take apart center.