Polar Bear Learning

Hopefully the last of our big snows, very cold -25 days, and no school are over! In the meantime we have used the Arctic and Polar Bears for some learning. The students had to measure in math to try and make a 12 inch paw with 5-2 inch claws for our Polar Bear. Then, they each wrote facts about the bear on the paw to display. They also measured the bear and decided it was probably a male because it was 8 feet 4 inches tall and the females are from 6 to 8 feet maximum. We are now working on slow earth changes with fossils and dinosaurs.

National Symbols

The students have been working hard on their group project National Symbols. Each group picked a symbol to research, make a poster, and then a power point presentation to teach the rest of the class about their symbol.  All of the students did a great job and had practice working in a group to get a project done. I used our i-pad to tape the presentations for the students to watch. Many wanted to redo it because of something they did not like. They all did a fantastic job and are now experts on power point presentations. (A quick note -some of the video titles are not capitalized properly-note to self it automatically does this so when I was hitting shift it was changing to a lower case letter. Please excuse the error,) They will try their hand and making their own power points later. We finished off our week with our Valentines activities and party!

 

Playing In Snow, Learning about Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow!!!

For the past several weeks we have done a lot with snow. We have made pictures with a list of clues of something hidden in the snow. The students then drew their animal or object and used an clear, acetate overlay to hide it under snow. The students loved looking at  these and then deciding if they guessed right before peeking underneath. After listening to Snowflake Bentley on Bookflix and learning about how snow is made, the students made snowflakes on-line with the program Make-a-flake (they love doing this), cutting their own snowflakes from paper, and making a crystal snowflake. We do these activities as part of the 100th day to try and get 100 flakes made. We also wrote about playing with our friends and their favorite activities. Codder even brought in snow he had made from a kit. It has been a month of snow! 

Also this month, after learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., the students read and listened to biographies, and then wrote about a person in history. They practiced their typing skills and adding pictures to a document, then presented their biography to the students. I will add another post to talk about our measuring and math!