Tie Dye, Cedar Class Plants, and 100th Day
/This week was packed to the brim with fun, learning, and celebrations. We’ve been discussing changes on earth and this week we took time to document the changes that have occurred in our outdoor classroom. In September students took photographs of our plants and garden areas at the end of summer. This week they took photos of the plants as we near the end of winter. Most of our plants and gardens look much different than they did back in September. In a couple of months we will document what the plants look like in spring and then create posters of the changes we’ve observed. For our geology explorations we had the opportunity to examine a variety of rock and mineral samples from Hudson’s mom. Hudson gave each student an agate that he collected on an Oregon beach. Students got to see a plant fossil that is 55 million years old and even a rock that glowed in the dark! This week we started learning about the difference between rocks and minerals. Minerals are the building blocks of rocks and most rocks are made up of multiple minerals. We examined several mineral samples including feldspar, pyrite, mica, and quartz. We learned that minerals are used in everyday materials such as paint, electronics, and dinnerware. Students used lego bricks to create a model of a mineral. Then groups of four students teamed up to create a collaborative rock model that was comprised of four different “minerals”. We also got a sneak peek of the rocks in our rock tumbler this morning. They’ve been tumbling with water and grit for six days. We were surprised to discover that instead of 33 rocks, we now have 36. The edges of the rocks are starting to look slightly rounder. We then put the rocks back in the tumbler to tumble for another week. This week we continued to record acts of kindness that we observed in our community. We’ve been writing each act of kindness on a heart and we are currently at 104 acts of kindness! We were excited to surpass 100 hearts before our 100th day of school. This week we also created kind messages to deliver along with the food drive items to support Forest Grove High School students who are facing food scarcity. Today was our 100th day of school! Students shared their amazing collections of 100 items and we practiced skip counting (and hopping) to 100 in a variety of ways. Ms. Aja brought in 100 snowballs and we had a snowball fight with 100 (fake) snowballs. On Friday we also got to tie dye our garments with Mr. Mark- what fun! We can’t wait to see how our garments turned out. A huge thank you to Mr. Mark for his time and dedication in making this annual event happen. It’s no easy task. This week Brendan’s mom came in to teach us how to play Fives Dominoes. This game helps students develop their number fluency, gain practice counting multiples of five, and learn how to use tally marks in record keeping. We ended our week together with a trip to the Forest Grove library and some relaxing reading time.
