April is the time for "Habitats, Cultures, Customs and Celebrations!"

 

We had our last travel day; this time we studied Mexico with it's habitats of deserts and rainforests. Students wrote their first factual report on their favorite desert animal as well as made "serape ponchos" with math pattern blocks to show off Mexican weaving skills! 

 

Everyone had a chance to fry their tortillas to make fresh nachos, Spanish counting books, bird seed filled cascarones and a paper poinsettia to accompany the folktale "The Legend of the Poinsettia." 
 

(Note: Cascarones are like confetti filled mini- pinatas made of empty eggshells. The tradition is to crack them over their heads! We altered that to be bird seed filled and we cracked them against our mystery tree so the birds could enjoy our efforts too.)

 

As usual, we all have to thank our kind parents and grandparents for volunteering their time and donating items for our activities! We could have never put this together without their help. 

 

February- March

February- March     Check out the red phone booth from the U.K. !

What is a phone booth?

   We had the pleasure of a quick pretend visit to England to compare customs, money and learn some useful information about Britain. James' mom was born in the United Kingdom and was kind enough to come in with her official passport as well as some fun facts! Below are a few moments she captured; most were shots of us marveling over her stamp collection as a child. We learned that England had the first stamp and post office- and they also started the tradition of sending postcards. We then made some cards for family and designed our own stamps. Best of all James' mom brought in crackers- a surprise toy that is hidden in a paper "cracker" that you pull apart with a "crackle pop." Out comes a paper crown plus a toy! Everyone felt that was the best custom ever!

Who said it was the same language?

  And now a word from our Big 5th Grade Learning Buddies !
Every Thursday that we can, we get together to play math games, read and sometimes share stories we have written with our 5th grade buddies in Mr. Choate's class. Soon our buddies are going to teach us how to count in Chinese!

 Many students pick this as their favorite time of all. It is great to see the bond that happens over time with these partners.

SNOWFLAKE
INVESTIGATIONS

Science Wonder Investigation:
"Do snowflakes have parts?"

All year long we have asked the question...
 "Does ________have parts?"  

So far we have discovered many things in our science investigations. We have looked closely, using science tools such as magnifying glasses and toothpicks, and then recorded our findings. In September we looked closely and took apart a leaf, in October we repeated a similar investigation and took a pumpkin apart. November we repeated our question and discovered a lot about feathers- and the job of different parts of the feather. So it was only a matter of time before we decided to investigate snowballs and snowflakes after reading "The Snowy Day" and "Sadie and the Snowball." We have also read about "Snowflake Bentley" who was the first person to successfully photograph a single snowflake. Then we made our own snowflakes based on what we learned; enjoy some samples of these on display above. It was so surprising to all of us how many shapes we have studied in math are in each and every snowflake! Nature is the ultimate math wizard and artist extraordinaire.

We have also been reading books about animals who live in the arctic. When we read about polar bears, orca whales and walruses we kept hearing about how "blubber" keeps these animals warm in the icy waters of the north pole. So we tried out how fat can keep our thumb warm in a bucket of ice water- using Crisco.
 

 

   December is Travel Time in 
           Our Classroom ! 

For this month it is all about learning our featured vocabulary words: tradition and custom. We also get to learn about new countries and what they see and do in other places. What is the same? What is different?  Being able to compare and contrast is a skill needed for reading, writing, science and math!  Our first travel day was to Russia. We made our own Russian"Faberge Egg" with jewels, a puppet about the Russian folktale "Snow Maiden" who flies, a counting book to help count to 10 in Russian and we sampled the yummy blini pancakes while listening to the Russian composer who wrote the Nutcracker. Thanks to all who donated the materials and came in to volunteer during our celebration of different cultures! (Next country will be Mexico later in the year! And we will have several mini- studies of England and China as well. Stay tuned!)
  
Sending postcards from Russia to tell about our travels!

 

Adding jewels is very hard work!

Behold the flying Snow Maiden!

It is pumpkin time!

The first graders have been reading about pumpkins. They have counted the seeds inside their Color Group/Team's pumpkin...grouping seeds in piles of 10. Most were surprised to find out that each pumpkin had more than 200+ seeds!

 

  

Next it was time to see if our pumpkin would "turn into food for the soil" like the book we read aloud called "Pumpkin Circle"from our Great Falls Library. We recorded our observations of our pumpkin just 3 days after we had counted the seeds. It was flat and mushy! Here are a few scientists at work at this last "Pumpkin Investigation."

 

And now we are starting to make new friends and learn about customs of people both near and far! Each week we buddy up with Mr. Choate's 5th grade class to read, investigate or play a math game. Below are a couple of photos of our Big Learning Buddies.

 

Staying in the Math Mind of how to make groups of 10...we taught our Big Buddies how to play the card game"Go Fish   for 10" !!  Next we learned a new way to show how to make a number using "Part Part Total" pictures. Look close to see the number of Pilgrims and the number of Native Americans in each picture students created of the Thanksgiving feast of long ago. Then check out the number when we added all of our pictures together!