Sand Paintings and Dream Catchers

We are wrapping up our unit on Native Americans so we decided to have some fun arts and crafts centers that go along with them! We made dream catchers and sand paintings like the Navajo Indians. Below is a group getting their dream catchers started.
Look at the interesting design that Remi made with his string.

Clay had a blast with his sand painting!

Payton showed her creativity with her colorful sand painting.

Here was one group's finished products of their sand paintings. The colors were so bright it made them pop right off of the page!

Surprise Heads

Every so often, when time allows, we will do some creative enrichment activities. We have a new bulletin board set up outside of our room to display this work. We are calling it "The Think Tank." Please stop by and visit it to check out the amazing imagination of our students!

The first activity was did was called Surprise Heads. There were four different sets of directions, and in the middle of them we changed our minds as to what we wanted the children to draw. They had to take an ordinary every day object and turn it into something else. Below is an example of what the students heard for one of the squares.

All of the students did great with this activity but we chose Serena's and Casey's to spotlight for this activity. The addition of color to their drawings made them pop right off the page!

Fun with Seeds and Plants!

Our first science unit on plants is going great. As you can see below, our seeds are in different stages of germination.
Today we observed our seeds. We talked about how the more detailed the observation the better it is. We looked at the stems, leaves, and roots of our plants. It was really neat to see how complicated all the roots looked!

After we were finished observing we had some choices of what we could do. We also have some websites that the students can visit to learn more about plants. These boys were exploring some of those websites.

Jack K. got hooked on this one! You have to adjust the conditions of temperature and water to make your plant grow.

We also have some enrichment options relating to science. They can pretend they are a coconut and tell about their journey floating in the water or make a bean seed mosaic. Here Analiese and Kiyomi are starting their mosaics. Can't wait to see how they turn out!

Fun in Science with the Smartboard!

We learned a lot today in science! We talked about the main parts of a plant and the process of how a plant makes food. We learned new words such as photosynthesis and cellulose. Here Casey is re-explaining the process of photosynthesis to the class.
At the end of our lesson we labeled the main parts of plant. Maxine labeled the roots. We learned that the roots are like a straw for a plant.

Clay labeled the flower.

Nathan labeled the stem of the plant.

Gabrielle labeled the leaf. We learned alot of new things about leaves that we didnt know before. One example is that leaves have tiny openings on their underside that allows them to take in carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and release water when the roots get too full!

Socializing in Social Studies

We are studying Native Americans in Social Studies. We have learned about the Navajo, Yurok, and Cherokee tribes. Today we learned about the Haudenosaunee. Each table got a section of the selection to teach the class. They had to make a visual aid to accompany their presentation. This helped us work on learning our content AND how to work in a group. As we circulated around we saw great interaction within the groups. Each group took a slightly different tactic to how they were going to use their visual aid to help them "teach" their section. It was a great learning experience for us all!

Super SMARTboard

We are both super excited to have the SMARTboard in our room this year. This technology can do so many cool things. We can watch our morning announcements on it, watch a powerpoint, watch educational movies, and even write on it! (using special pens of course)
Jack D and Luke M. were our first lucky contestants to get to show their math work using the SMARTboard.