Monday, May 18, 2015

The Three Little Pig Engineers

We read the story "The Three Little Pigs" today. After reading the story, we discussed the different materials that each pig used to build their house. We had a great conversation about how important it is to be a hard worker and to not be "lazy" like the young pig from the book. I tasked the students with re-creating the story by constructing their own pig house. Each table was assigned to work with a material that matched the story. They had to use their engineering skills to build a strong house that the scary wolf (blow dryer) could not knock down! In order to work as a team, I selected a "Friendship Leader" for each group. This leader was in charge of making sure that all the students worked together, took turns and used kind words. Before any building could commence, they had to begin by studying the materials and discussing their game plan. Once they had a nice, collaborative brainstorming session, the building could begin!

Here is the start of their "stick house".

They worked so hard to make the stick house "just so".
Check out this beautiful "straw house".


Uh oh... here comes the Big Bad Wolf!
Oh no! The wolf huffed and puffed and blew the house down!
The stick house wasn't strong enough to stand up to the Big Bad Wolf either.


Look at the anticipation on their faces :) Lucky for them, the wolf could not knock down their brick house.

Here are a few quotes from the students as I walked around and listen to them discuss their project.

"Listen guys, Do you want the house to blow down? Im trying to build a good house!"

"I think I have an idea. We can twist it like this."

"Oh look at this square. It has straight lines."

"We need windows for our house because if it doesn't have windows then it will be like a big block."

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

We love plants!

We have been learning all about plants and how they grow!
We planted our own Lima beans and we've got a few plants growing strong.

We learned about what plants need to grow and we sequenced the steps.


We learned about the parts of a plant and made these flip books to show what each part of the plant does.


We had special visitors during our plant unit who taught us even more about plants and brought each student their own tomato plant. Thank you Batemans!




We read the story of "Tops and Bottoms" and learned about which vegetables grow on top of the soil and which grow underneath.


This went well with our next activity where the kids got to eat all five parts of a plant! The seeds were the favorite overall.


We started counting by 5's and used nickels to create our own nickel gardens.

Other exciting news! Our butterflies have emerged from their chrysalis. Here we are watching intently while one pushes his way out!