Monterey Bay Aquarium

Today was the big day for our virtual field trip.  Everyone was so excited to travel to California's Monterey Bay Aquarium.  We were able to see many videos of animals in action, including: sharks, otters, penguins, clownfish, octopus, rockfish, eels and more!  Parents you are invited to see the same videos by clicking here.  We enjoyed visiting the animals at the aquairum, and have already begun planning for our next personal narrative writing pieces. 

Tomorrow we will complete a plan for our writing.  On Monday, we will finally be able to share our experience with others by writing down our favorite exhibits from the virtual trip today.  Check back later next week to see the class' nominations for best storytelling featured here on the blog! 

Field Trip TOMORROW!

We are loading the buses and heading to California's Monterey Bay Aquarium tomorrow. Just kidding. We won't actually be driving to Monterey Bay Aquarium, instead we are going on a virtual field trip. From the comfort of the foam rug we will experience what it's like to visit one of the nation's most desirable attractions.

We have been working hard in writing to share personal narratives(a written story telling about something we experienced). We are struggling to remember all parts of our narratives, so we are going to spend the remainder of the week working on a personal narrative together. A shared experience is always a fun topic to write about.

Tomorrow we 'travel' and explore Monterey Bay Aquarium, then we will plan and write our stories later this week. We are excited to share our trip and personal narratives with you!

Can you guess which exhibit we will visit first?

Sorting in Math

We have been learning about attributes of objects and shapes. During math workshop yesterday we sorted sea shells, figurines, buttons and shapes based on attributes of our choice.

Cinnamon Ornaments

Students were eager to get started on our latest ornament. The cinnamon has filled our room with the most wonderful fragrance. "It smells like cookies in here," they say.

We turned our craft into math and reading review. We measured, counted and read the recipe together. Students took turns photographing, combining ingredients, measuring, and stirring.

We each used Ms. Pace's cookie cutter to cut out our own gingerbread man. We will have to wait several days for the dough to dry so we can put them on our tree. In the meantime, we'll be sniffing the aroma of cookies. {grin}

We're really excited to get these on the tree!

Synergizing Researchers

First graders in Ms. Wilson's class are using the Mac Air lab to research animals of their choice.  We will be researching them for the remainder of this week and adding our new learning to our research notebooks.  We are so excited to use our school's newest technology with the help of Mr. Massey.  We're also synergizing with the Research Center and Ms. Quinn's computer lab.  We have really become researching machines! 

Check us out in action. 

Collecting non-fiction books of our choice from the Research Center.

Here we are working hard to collect facts from our non-fiction books to add to our research notebooks.

We have highly anticipated using the Mac Air lab to do research on this website.  Feel free to research other animals with your child at home.

Ms. Quinn helped us use World Book Kids in the computer lab to add even more information to our notebooks. 

We are happy animal researchers, and can't wait to share our new learning with you. 

Rudolph the Candy Cane Reindeer

On Monday we were excited to see what our new ornament would be. The excitement was evident as students worked hard all day long.

Students collected their own materials for the project. They were instructed to gather 2 candy canes, 1 brown paper square, 2 eyes, 1 red pom pom, a piece of tape and glue.

Our finished products have been added to the tree! 

We have more than 80 ornaments on the tree now.

Icicles

We used pipe cleaners, laundry soap, and warm water to make sparkling icicles.

This was an easy ornament to make... all we did was swirl our pipe cleaner around our pencil. Then, we hung our swirls in warm soapy water to sit all weekend long. When we came back to school this morning to our surprise we had beautifully, sparkly icicles.

Our tree looks wonderful! We have so many ornaments already.