Halloween Party

Our crew had a wonderful time celebrating Halloween together! We were able to show the school our costumes in the Halloween Parade. After the parade, we spent the morning enjoying delicious breakfast treats, decorating jack-o-lanterns and ghosts, and bowling with "ghosts". The students had an absolute blast! Thank you to Jennifer Giambrone for planning a great event, and thank you to all of the families that donated supplies and/or joined us for this celebration. This party would not have been a success without your support. Happy Halloween!

Non-fiction

Our crew is becoming experts on non-fiction in reading and writing! 

As readers, we have read non-fiction books and discovered text features that authors include to help readers learn. We eventually will use these non-fiction text features to create a book about pond life.

For now, we are practicing these non-fiction text features as we read. This week, we focused on captions. The students wrote a caption to describe a photograph. We learned captions need to describe the photograph using facts and true information, as well as be interesting, short, and specific. We also spent some time comparing a table of contents and an index. We learned the table of contents shares the headings and pages numbers, and an index shares specific words in the text along with page numbers.

In writing, our students are learning to write informational text. As a class, we have discovered that informational text is text that teaches facts to readers. The students have been researching a pond life animal, writing facts, and creating their own informational text about the animal they are studying. We have discussed organization and sentence fluency. In the weeks to come, the students will begin adding a topic sentence, conclusion, and supporting details to the informational text they are composing.

Fieldwork to Carson Nature Center

Our students visited Carson Nature Center today to participate in our second fieldwork with Ranger Beth. The students had the opportunity to visit wetland, the river edge, and grassland habitats to discover organisms. The students were able to discover the following information about each habitat:

Wetlands are sunny, wet, windy, and near water. Wetlands include any habitat that has shallow water. Organisms such as cattails, mice, ducks, and beavers live in this habitat.

 

The river edge is where the river meets the land. In this habitat, it is sunny, shady, wet, and windy. Organisms such as cottonwood trees, raccoons, mice, squirrels, ducks, rabbits, and beavers can be found in this habitat.

Grasslands are habitats that are large open areas of grass. This habitat is sunny, dry and windy. Tall and short plants, raccoons, mice, chipmunks, rabbits, and even snakes live in this habitat. (See if you can spot the snake in the photograph of grass below!) :)

Along with learning about different habitats, the students had the opportunity to learn about seed dispersal and pollination. The students discovered that some animals pollinate and others disperse seeds. Seeds can be dispersed through water, wind, scat, and even by connecting on to another animal's fur.

The students also had the ability to interact with a flood table. The students were able to place plants and animals in areas they believe would best survive. Once a flood appeared, the students noticed the flood affected the entire wetland and river edge! They moved animals and plants around to finally discover the best place for these organisms to thirve.

This fieldwork helped us learn about different habitats. In the weeks to come, we will compare these different habitats and discover how organisms survive and thrive.