News from the Shocking Sugar Gliders!

Wow! The end of our wonderful school year is just around the corner! There is so much happening in the coming days that I decided to post all important dates today so we can get them on our calendars. Phew! It's a full calendar packed with great learning experiences and fun!

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

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. ****

Reminders and Important Dates

ANIMAL/ PLANT PRESENTATIONS DUE THIS WEEK!

Council of Critters: Thursday April 22 @ 2:30~please join us and witness the pleas

of the rainforest critters!

View our rainforest art at Traditions this weekend for Arts Walk!

Saturday, April 24: Procession of the Species~ Come walk with us!

I am still collecting paper towel rolls! Please send in any you may have!

Math

How tall are you? How long is your foot? How many of your feet tall are you? These are some of the questions we’ve been exploring in our study of measurement! Interestingly, most of us were between 6 and 8 of our feet tall. We are wondering if this trend would continue if we were to measure more people…especially people that are taller than we are! We have a variety of predictions…so, if you’d like to figure out how many of your feet tall you are, we’d love to add your findings to our graph!

We have been measuring big things and little things, wide things and thin things. It has been fun learning to use and practicing using rulers, yardsticks and tape measures. We have also been measuring things using cubes, our hands, our feet, our pencils…because, as one student pointed out, you can use anything to measure with (just make sure you remember to include the units in your measurement!)! We’ve been comparing the lengths of many objects (including many of your feet!), and will soon be hunting for objects of particular lengths…fun, fun!

Coming soon…Our study of measurement will extend into our study of the rainforest as we learn the amount of rainfall in a tropical rain forest, as well as the sizes of the various animals we studied.

Language Arts

Spring is here! There are many exciting aspects of Spring…in fact we were able to think of many for each of the letters of Spring! After a group brainstorming session, we each wrote our own Spring Acrostic poems, and created a lovely piece of Spring art to accompany it! It was nice seeing everyone put so much thought into their creations! Check these out on a wall near you soon!

Writing workshop continues as a focused writing time. This week we spent time revising and finishing up our current stories as we prepare to move into a unit on poetry! The editing process varies from student to student. Students begin with rereading their pieces and checking that their writing makes sense and that no words or important details are missing. For some it involves circling words they are not sure of and revising the spelling with an adult. For others it means being sure to include capital letters and periods. Some may be adding an ending sound to a word or creating a space between words. One of the final steps in creating our writing workshop stories is stapling the pages together, and I must say there was LOTS stapling this week!

We read a fable about kindness this week. After reading it, we had a very interesting discussion about the story and also about kindness in our lives. A particularly interesting piece of the conversation was about times in our lives when we were feeling grumpy or just didn't think about what we were saying and said something unkind to somebody. It was really interesting hearing the kids' perspectives on this and how they felt when it happened and how the imagined the recipient felt. After this discussion, we created lists in groups of things we can do as kind friends...we compiled our ideas into one group list...check it out if you're interested!

Theme

We have been learning many fascinating facts about rainforest plants, including the many adaptations the trees have that enable them to live in such a moist environment! Rainforest trees often times have large buttresses or stilt roots to help provide support, drip tips on the leaves to prevent the collection of too much water, and smooth shiny bark to create a slippery surface for any vines trying to take root! Ask your child about the amazing walking trees…yes there are trees that can actually move! Each student created a lovely illustration of these adaptations.

Did you know that the flowers of the rainforest have evolved to attract particular pollinators? For instance, flowers pollinated by bats are typically white and bloom at night…flowers pollinated by flies typically have a moldy rotting smell…(yuck!)…We created little flip books of different flowers and the creatures that pollinate them. Each of us also sketched and water colored a unique rainforest flowers!

A rainforest would not be a rainforest without rain! Water plays such an important role in the rainforest, as well as everywhere on Earth. We have begun exploring the concept of the water cycle and how water changes forms as it cycles. We saw this first hand in an experiment using steam to make it rain in our classroom! We watched as liquid water evaporated into water vapor and then condensed back into a liquid for as it would in the upper atmosphere. It was very exciting to actually see rain fall on our table!

To further illustrate the concept of the water cycle, and to also learn how plants fit into the cycle, we will be creating our own terrariums! Look for these Monday afternoon!

FYI: You are not seeing the rainforest work come home, as all of the work we are creating will be collected together in a large rainforest scrap book that we will put together at the end of the unit.

Poetry, Flowers and Fractions with the Shocking Sugar Gliders!

Important Dates
Friday, April 16th - Field Trip to the Procession Studio
Monday, April 19th - Animal Research Project Due
Thursday, April 22nd - Council of the Critters
Saturday, April 24th - Procession of the Species
Friday, April 30th - Field Trip with Stream Team (9:00-11:30)

Friday Workshops
Friday, April 16th
Claire

Animal Research Presentations
Monday, April 19th
1:00 Owen
2:30 Zachary

Tuesday, April 20th
1:00 Oliver
2:00 Cedar
2:30 Sequoia

Wednesday, April 21st
9:15 Kat
9:45 Jack
10:45 Claire
11:30 Maggi

**If you need to make a change to the time your child is presenting please try to contact another family to switch times and let me know. Thank you!**

Math
Halves, fourths, eighths, sixteenths....why yes, its fraction time! We have begun our exploration of fractions by looking at a whole and dividing it into parts. Pattern blocks have been a fun and handy way of helping us learn this concept. Our hexagon equals 1 whole. Two red trapezoids fit on a hexagon so they can each equal one-half. Our blue diamond is one-third and our green triangles are sixths. For some who have used our pattern blocks in this way in the past were challenged with the idea of giving our hexagon a different value. Say what?! Yeah! What if our yellow hexagon is equal to two, what would our trapezoids equal? Diamond? Triangle? What if our hexagon equals 12?

We played Fraction Hexagon to see how different fractions can be added together to make a whole (1). It also showed us that fractions can have different names, their equivalents like three-sixth is the same as one-half. We also created patterns or pictures with pattern blocks and were then challenged to find the value of our picture by adding up the fractional parts. This seemed really hard at first until we realized we can make wholes (1's) by putting our blocks together. We will continue with thinking about fractions as parts of a whole with other games like Hexagon Wipe-Out (where we are subtracting fractions) and adding fractions from a grab bag. Oh, learning about fractions would not be complete without our daily dose of “Action Fraction” dancing!


Language
We continue to be inspired by the rainforest and have turned our attention to poetry. We read poems from”Looking for Jaguar” that gave us wonderful examples of poems that sometimes rhyme, use vivid language, and how spacing is used to help the reader read the poem as the author intended. We created our first drafts of our poems this week and will work with these in the following weeks as we craft our final version.

Word sorts this week focused on “y, ies, ied,” “ge,” “ie, ee, ea,” and “ight, i-e.” Some of us who are working on cursive challenged ourselves by recording our words in cursive - yahoo!


Theme
We spent some time this week looking at the water cycle and the role trees have in this cycle. We had fun watching transpiration at work with our carnations in colored water! We also created a “water cycle column” (on our window sill). The column contains all the parts of a water cycle. We even planted broccoli and radish seeds to play the part of trees! Check it out!

The beautiful flowers are hard to miss in the rainforest so we spent time learning the anatomy of flowers. After looking at a few flowers in our classroom and learning their parts we ventured outside to put our anatomy identification skills to the test! We found so many different flowers and were amazed at the different sizes stamens and pistils can be. Even the tiniest flower had all the parts (oh so tiny)!

How plants have evolved and adapted to the rainforest environment is pretty interesting. We looked at some of the major ways, such as how trees develop buttresses or stilt roots. Or, how plants have drip tips or really large leaves. And, then there our liana (vines), bromeliads, and epiphytes! All of these have developed characteristics to help them survive and thrive in the rainforest. Ask your child about these plant adaptations and how they help the plant.

These rainforest flowers also inspired us to create some art. Look on our wall for our beautiful pastels of heliconia, rafflesia, bromeliads, bird of paradise, and orchids.

We also spent parts of our afternoon doing groupwork. This week we discussed “put-downs,” what they are and how we feel when we hear them. We worked in pairs and as a whole group to discuss this issue. We decided that these words did not support us and it was not ok to say them to others or to our sweet selves! I invite you to continue this conversation with your child at home.

Our trip to the Procession of the Species Studio was inspiring! We were all in awe as we admired the wonderful creations. Batiking our flags was great fun. I can't wait to see them flying high at the Procession!

**No math or spelling homework this week or next! Also, since we have our big animal research project this month, a book share does not need to be turned in this month.**