Thank you for supporting our trip to the Book Fair this week. The children did a great job carefully selecting books and helped each other find books at the fair. Some children even came prepared with a list of books to purchase. Great idea!
As mentioned in earlier blog posts, we finished our team-wide workshop rotations on life cycles and adaptations. In our class, however, we celebrated the unit by creating a Voicethread. A Voicethread is an online tool that allows us to share our thinking in various multi-media platforms. Each student has an online avatar, which is their self-portraits that we created earlier this year. That way, we have a safe online picture. For this particular Voicethread, we choose to share our understanding of spiders, bats, insects, snakes and the Venus Flytrap by podcasting or typing. I uploaded pictures representing each science workshop and the children choose which animal they wanted to share something they learned. Please click on the link below and listen to what they had to share. They learned so much and did an amazing job using this new digital tool. Voicethread also allows anyone with a Voicethread account to comment, so I invited our learning buddies and our global friends on The "Flat Classroom" to respond as well. Hopefully, we will get some comments soon. Last year, we received comments from children all over the world when we shared a Voicethread on what it means to be safe, kind and responsible at Allen Brook. This year, we created a video instead!
Here is the link to our science Voicethread. Please feel free to comment if you'd like.
Last week, we started studying Colonial America, the Mayflower and Thanksgiving. We have learned so much already. We started by exploring different books about the Mayflower and Colonial life in partnerships. We listened to various read alouds, practiced taking notes on post-it notes and created a KWL chart for our classroom. Throughout this unit, the children will participate in many different creative projects and yesterday, the children created a collage picture of the Mayflower. Ask your child to explain who Squanto was and why he is so important to American history. Perhaps your child also remembers how many passengers were on the Mayflower and how long it took for this wooden ship to cross the Atlantic? Throughout this unit, we will also study many different words in context. So far, we are learning the words pilgrim, colony, colonial and freedom. Ask your child to explain. Next week, we will learn about colonial schools, games and the different roles boys and girls had in society.
Lastly, I wanted to apologize that I have not noticed until a student mentioned that the pictures from our butterflies did not upload properly when I posted them back in late October. If you recall, we had two days off from school, October 17th and 18th, and our butterflies had just hatched. I had to release them when the children were on this extended break from school. I took the butterfly pavillion home and released the butterflies in Underhill. The pictures never uploaded. Well, here they are. Sorry about the delay! The butterflies did well and should have had plenty of time to make it to warmer weather!
Maria
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