Giraffes in Wonderland

This week, we imagined what it would be like to be Alice and fall into our own Wonderland! We each created our very own rabbit hole (diving rabbit included!) and we drew a picture of what we pictured our own Wonderland to look like.

In each of our Wonderlands, we included a bug (like Alice's friend the Caterpillar), a villain (like the Queen of Hearts) and a friend we'd like to have tea with, such as the Mad Hatter :) 

A few of us are still working on our creations, but here are a few of our completed projects! Hopefully another furry friend who will be visiting many of us this weekend will swing by school to check them out :)

Knuffle Giraffe: An Educational Tale by 2R

This week, we worked on converting our black and white photos of Stratham into our Mo Willems-inspired illustrations for our Knuffle Giraffe class book! 

We talked a lot about perspective when drawing our pictures. Once we decided on where we wanted to place ourselves in our picture, we talked about how big our illustrated selves should be and we also talked about what we should be doing in our pictures. Some of our characters are posing with some of their favorite places, while others are opening doors, jumping in leaves, and sliding on the playground! 

We also worked on writing short narratives about our illustrations, where we talked about the places in our photographs and what we like to do there, which Ms. Riley has typed up to add to our book. Here are a few pages of our story:

Snowflakes in the air...

This week, we began crafting our first of many holiday creations. On Wednesday, we made tissue paper collages using small squares of tissue paper and we also painted half of a piece of white paper blue.

We had no idea why Ms. Riley was having us do this, until Thursday when she showed us we were creating a winter scene! We used the tissue paper collages we created and we drew evergreen trees of various sizes on the back. After we cut them out, we glued them along with some snowy white hole punches to our watercolor paper (we loved our tissue collage paper so much, we put our scraps in our image-making paper bin to use again at a later date!) They came out so beautifully and served as the perfect inspiration for some of the writing we did on Friday...more on that later, but for right now, it is a surprise :)

Dissecting Owl Pellets

Friday was the day many of the giraffes had been waiting for throughout our entire New Hampshire Animals unit, for it was the day we got to dissect real-life owl pellets! Owls, like most birds, eat their food whole because birds do not have teeth. So, when an owl catches its prey, it swallows it and later regurgitates (or spits up) the parts of the animal or insect they cannot digest, such as bones, fur, feathers, etc in the form of a pellet.

Prior to dissecting our pellets, we make predictions as to what kinds of things we would find in the pellet. These predictions included:

• Bones from mice, rats, snakes, other birds, deer 
• Fur
• Feathers
• Dirt
• Grass

While we didn't find everything we had predicted in our pellets, we did find many of those things, especially bones! We used this bone identification key to help us figure out what exactly our owls had eaten:

After measuring our pellets in inches, everyone worked carefully to dissect  their pellets using their hands and toothpicks for the more delicate bones. We were amazed by what we were able to uncover! 

When we had finished dissecting our pellets, we identified which animal bones we found and counted  the total number of bones in our pellets. Some friends uncovered over 40 bones! We also talked about whether or not we thought the bones all came from one animal, and many of us inferred that we had pellets with bones from a few different animals because there were more than 1 skull in some and others included fur and feathers. 

We saw that the skulls had quite a variety of teeth in them. Ms. Riley made sure to tell us that the Tooth Fairy would NOT accept these teeth and to please not leave them under pillows for her to find :) 

This was a great way to wrap up our New Hampshire Animals unit! We would also like to extend a big thank you to our parent volunteer who shared in this awesome learning experience with us and who also helped us clean up the classroom once it was over! 

If you would like to join in on the fun, there is an awesome website you can visit where you can virtually dissect an owl pellet! 

"Strive to find things to be thankful for, and just look for the good in who you are!"

Over the past few days, we have been celebrating all that we have to be thankful for in honor of our upcoming Thanksgiving festivities. We've discussed what it means to be thankful, and thought about all of the people, places, and things that we are grateful to have in our lives. We've even thought about what others might be thankful for! 

Yesterday, our daily letter asked us to think about what we believe Mr. Fosher is thankful for. This is the list we came up with, and boy is he thankful for a lot of things! 

Afterwards, we celebrated another important aspect of Thanksgiving: The Turkey!! We each made our eon feathery friends complete with geometric decorations on their tail feathers :) 

After we finished our turkeys, Ms. Arnold's owls joined us to share a fall poem and also to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving! It was so nice to end the day by spending it with our friends next door :) Bravo on your wonderful fall poem! 

To everyone in our lives, we are thankful for the love and support you provide for us each and every day!! Have a wonderful time celebrating with your friends and family, and stay safe in that snow!!!! :) 

(And, of course, a silly photo. Would it really be 2R without one?)