Spring!

I love every part of the school year.  The Fall as we begin building our community together, creating agreements, and developing routines.  Winter as we are all cozy inside in the depths of exploring, learning and growing.  And then there is Spring. One of the many moments I love during this time of year is when the warm sunlight fills our library while children linger over their books.  It is such sweetness.  I step back for a moment and become truly aware of the amount of independence and responsibility that has developed over the year. We have grown SO much and it is SO beautiful.

This time of year also goes by toooo fast.  So much happening, wrapping up projects, starting new projects, end of the year projects, field trips, crazy week....Our days together are numbered and our year together is coming to an end and I want to hold on for a little bit longer!  I want to sloooow down time and linger in these last sweet, sweet moments together.

Math
Fractions were so fun!  Who knew math could be so tasty!  Our favorites were fractioning bananas and apples but describing our trail mix with fractions and eating them was pretty yummy, too! Not only did we have fun eating them but creating pictures with pattern blocks and finding their fractional value and designing our own "Beady Creatures" and describing them with fractions (i.e. 3/12 of the beads are sparkly purple) was fun, too. 

More recently, we have been playing with multiplications and for some seeing how counting by 2s, 5s and 10s and be so handy!  Others are practicing 3s and 4s while some work on double digit multiplication.  We are also exploring division a bit.  It is all about a fair share in our classroom.  We begin learning about division by sharing (i.e. cookies) and making a fair share between friends with manipulatives.  As the concept of division develops, we shift our perspective from sharing to grouping.  How many groups of 5 can we make from 30?  It has been so fun see the children who have been working with multiplication for a while really see and use that connection to help them with division. 

Literacy
Kur-plunk! Zoom! Onomatopoeias are filling our room!  We had fun learning about these interesting words and finding ways to use them in our Writing Workshop stories to bring a little spice to our writing.  We are noticing them in our own readings as well (check out our poster we have been adding to these past couple of weeks!). Onomatopoeias are everywhere!  Check out our favorites in a book we made in our classroom (along with our favorite similes). 

We have started playing with poetry again.  We wrote sweet little cinquain poems about May in honor of May Day.  We learned (or reviewed) adjectives and verbs to help us with this structured poetry form.  We look forward to playing with other poetry forms like shape poems and free form.  We will also investigate other types of words (adverbs and nouns) that will help us create pictures with our words.

Theme
We finally made it to Oregon!  Phew, what a long, dusty trip!  Keep a look out for you child's Pioneer book coming your way, filled will many of the things we learned and encountered on our travels on the Oregon Trail.

The time machine has now dropped us in 1950 onto the Calypso with Jacque Cousteau.  We have learned a bit about the life of Jacque, his love for the ocean, co-invention of the "aqua-lung" and his passion for protecting the ocean.  We will dive in to the ocean with Jacque Cousteau as our guide.  His deep love for the ocean will lead us in our own discoveries of what lies beneath and fuel our desires to continue his work in protecting our beautiful oceans.

We have already learned some interesting ocean facts and a bit about the top "sunlight" layer.  We are working on an animal study together of the sea otter.  As we ask questions and learn about different aspects of this cute marine mammal, children will gather ideas of how to go about their independent ocean animal research project. 

Check out the great time we had with the scuba divers!