Important Dates
Friday May 14th - Field Trip with Stream Team 9:00-1:00
Monday May 17th - Field Trip to McAllister Springs 12:00-3:00
Monday May 31st - No School
Friday June 4th - Field Trip
Saturday June 5th - OCS Alumni and Friends Spring Picnic
Thursday June 10th - All Day Field Trip to Woodland Park Zoo (Seattle)
Friday June 11th - Half Day (12:00)
Saturday/Sunday June 12/13 - OCS Camp-out
Week of June 14-18 - Crazy Week! (more details posted later)
Friday June 18th - Field Day
Monday June 21st - Last Day of School - Half Day (12:00)
Tuesday June 22nd - End of the Year Picnic/Ceremony
Final Friday Workshops Schedule!!!
May 14th
Sequoia
Kat
May 21st
Oliver
Maggi
May 28th
Owen
Owen
Cedar
It has been a couple of weeks since our last post and so much has happened, where to begin?! First, I hope you were able to see our children's beautiful rainforest shadow boxes on display at Traditions for Artswalk. We were all delighted with how they turned out. To prepare for our creations we learned a bit about Henry Rousseau and his jungle paintings. We took note of how his paintings are so full of plant life and colors (and laughed when we read that sometimes he frightened himself with his own paintings of tigers in the jungle!). We also looked at Haitian box art and then combined the two styles to create our own lovely rainforest shadow boxes.
Here are a few pictures of our work with Stream Team at Circle Hawk Farm. We carried buckets of mulch to the trees near the stream and some of us worked on clipping back the blackberries. It was fun spending time together outside and working together to help our trees and stream!
Math
We finished our work with fractions last week and are focusing our minds on subtraction. We are playing a few games this week to get us in the subtraction mode by finding the difference between numbers. Some of us like to use a number line and hop from number to number to help us find the difference and others like to add on to the smaller number to get to the higher number. We will continue to play games throughout our subtraction unit that help us practice math facts, understand the concept (especially when we do borrowing) and have fun while we are learning about it!
Language
Poetry has been our focus this last week and will be for several weeks. We first wrote poems that captured the rainforest. We put all our descriptive words, onomatopoeias, and similes to work to write incredibly powerful poems. We thought about line breaks and space to bring more music to our poem. We also played with the form of our poem and how it can bring more power to certain words. Some of us included word art or aspects of concrete poetry into our poems.
In the next few weeks, we will try out techniques poets use to write poems. This week we are creating poems about simple, ordinary things around us and to do this we are putting our "poetic eye" to work. We are looking at (and smelling, feeling, hearing, and tasting) ordinary things with a fresh, new perspective and writing about them in a totally new, imaginative way. We looked at staplers, swings, bird baths, pencils, etc. and wrote down phrases, descriptions, or comparisons that we may later piece together into a poem. We had to check our descriptions to see if we were using our "poetic eyes" or our "scientific eyes." Everyone had incredible descriptions and will create very powerful poems!
Theme
We all think the rainforest produces some of the tastiest food on Earth! We certainly have enjoyed tasting and preparing a few treats. We learned all about the process of making the chocolate we like to eat, from the cacao pod, to drying the beans, grinding, and then mixing the powder with sweetener and cacao butter. Yummmmmy! Gum from chicle was just as interesting to learn about and to make. Ask your child if s/he can tell you the process to make this kind of gum and why it may help the rainforest to buy gum with chicle as an ingredient (which is hard to find!).
Many body products are made from ingredients that may come from the rainforest. We made a delicious lip balm with cocoa butter. What a treat for our lips!
Today we had a wonderful guest, our very own Steve from Fungi Perfecti!! Wow, fungi is so amazing! We learned about how important their role is in the ecosystem and the rainforest, their life cycle, and different ways humans use fungi for health and environmental clean-up. And, we will get to watch mushrooms grow in the coming weeks in our classroom! How cool!
The Lucky Leaf Cafe is doing very well! The children have made over $80 and plan to sell popcorn, truffles, and maybe fruit salad next week. We are still deciding which organization we would like to donate the money we raise. We have a couple of ideas and may split the money between the two organizations. We will keep you posted! Through our research of organizations we are learning more about indigenous communities as well as products that come from cleared rainforests. The children are putting together an informative poster to share their concern as well as inspire others to help protect our beautiful rainforests. Thank you for all your support! The children are so inspired to raise money and love selling the juices!
****Last book shares are due May 28th! Also, we are back to our homework routine and homework is due this Thursday. ****
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