Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Crazy Caterpillars!

This week, a new friend joined the giraffe class!




He is very small, but is getting bigger and bigger each day, and soon he will get ready to make a chrysalis!




We will continue to observe our Monarch Caterpillar every day and bring him milkweed to munch on. We love having the chance to observe nature in action up close!

Friday, April 22, 2016

Earth Day 2016: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Restore, Replenish

This week was filled with all sorts of Earth Day festivities--from growing our seedlings and planting seeds for our school garden to exploring and capturing the great outdoors. 


Our seedlings on Monday


Over the last two weeks, we've been growing our seedlings. They've made lots of growth already!


Our seedlings on Friday!




We've been continuing to write poems in Writer's Workshop, so we took the iPads outside to take some pictures that will inspire some of our poems when we return from vacation











On Friday, we had parent volunteers from the PTO visit our classroom. They helped us pick and plant seeds that will go into our school garden and we also got the chance to vote on the name of our new garden!





We also got a little crafty by using recycled tissue paper to create heart-shaped planets to show our love for our world


Lastly, we made one more ode to Earth Day by taking a quick hike on the trails in Stratham Hill Park. We took the trails all the way back to the pond by the base of the kill, where we got to see some handiwork done by the park's resident beavers! 






Happy Earth Day!





Sunday, April 17, 2016

"Breathe In Experience, Breathe Out Poetry"

This week, we've been acquainting ourselves with poetry while simultaneously becoming poets. Toward the beginning of the week, we read some poems together as a class and talked about how poets view objects through a poet's eye. While we may look at items and view them as scissors or a marker, a poet would view them as a shark waiting to pounce on its paper prey, or a fraction of a rainbow.


On Tuesday, we put on our poet lenses and headed outside to experience nature as poets. We walked across the field and down the trails, writing down all of our sensory experiences--what we heard, smelled, saw, felt, and even tasted! 









When we returned to the classroom, we talked about how writing a poem is very similar to writing the small moment stories we wrote at the beginning of the year, as it is about a small, detailed moment in time. So, we worked on turning our nature walk into a small story. 



Later in the week, we read our stories aloud and thought about how to make it into a poem by creating line breaks. Poets are very purposeful with the way they write their words on a line, and we listened to where we thought a line break would belong in our writing. We also took out words like "and" and made that a new line! 



Part of our homework this past week was to go on a poetry hunt. On Friday, we shared our poems with each other and talked about why we liked them! Some of them reminded us of scenes from our favorite seasons, some had great rhymes, and many of them made us laugh :) 






We are excited to continue on our poetry journey in the weeks ahead