Salmon Mural and Birthday Fun
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Over the last two weeks our young authors have been writing up a storm! They’ve learned much about the salmon life cycle, their dangerous migration journey, and their importance as a keystone species in our river ecosystems. Each student author wrote a ten page book about what they had learned. Our weekly literacy volunteers helped our students edit over two hundred pages of writing over the last few weeks. The growth we’ve observed in student writing production, increased mastery of writing conventions, and usage of scientific vocabulary in their writing has been immensely gratifying. This afternoon students designed a cover for their salmon books. Next week we will share these books and celebrate their hard work as nonfiction writers! This week we also put the finishing touches on our salmon mural. Each student designed a salmon egg, alevin, and fry to add to our mural. We hope you’ll stop by our classroom and check it! We are savoring the last few days with our salmon before we release them into the river next week. We love watching them flit gracefully around the tank. This week several engineers collaborated to create a massive Rigamajig structure that can support the weight of a student and was used in a variety of dramatic play activities. The preschool creative playroom was set up as a post office and students from all classes could write letters to mail around the school. Many students spent project time composing letters and postcards to mail to friends and siblings. Today we celebrated two class birthdays. During morning meeting we created a word cloud for each birthday child that contained many words describing their characteristics and things we love about them. In other exciting news, our December book order arrived and students loved pouring over our new class books. In fact, they were so excited about all our new books that many students carried them around campus and to our outside choice time as well.
