We read WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN THE MOUNTAINS, by Cynthia Rylant last week.  This week we've been working with the vocabulary and finding nouns.  We made a delicious buttermilk cornbread recipe and turned heavy cream into butter.  Today the Parakeets posed for pictures with snakes draped over their necks like the kids in the book.  We began a study of the Appalachian Mountains with this story of a coal mining family. 

We've been graphing...lengths of spaghetti, distance a paper airplane flies, favorite superheros, plant growth and more.  Here is a gallery of our recent work.

 Our primary writing goal this semester was to develop informative paragraphs with evidence and content vocabulary. Each essay needed a conclusion as well as a topic statement.  Toward this end, students wrote four informative paragraphs, adding to the complexity of their paragraph structure as they learned and practiced new writing objectives.  Students began with a review of nouns and verbs and then were encouraged in the use of adjectives to provide detail in their writing.  Simple sentences were turned into compound sentences using conjunctions as students developed their writing craft. 

Later in the semester, each student put together a booklet about grizzly bears. Initially, students worked in small groups to generate questions that would stir curiosity about grizzly bears.
Why grizzly bears?  

​We wanted to learn about grizzly bears after reading Moccasin Trail.  ​The main character, Jim, survives a grizzly attack.  We have been studying early settlers.  

When we thin the new rows of kale and carrots, Maybelline gets a treat!

We learned about the pea family last week in gardening.  This flower has a banner, a blade and a keel.

This week we are learning about cotyledons, monocots and dicots.  We have an experiment going with bean and corn seeds.  Mono means one and di means two.

In solar science we made a solar oven in a pizza box.

 We are working hard to finish building the Calavera STEAM projects because we still have to write them up.  Some students are finished with the critter book, and we will soon be putting our recommendations into practice.  

In math we have been learning a few special multiplication facts...6x6, 8x8, and 3x4. We are primarily trying to gain an understanding of the connection between repeated addition and multiplication...the bigger picture of what the x symbol means.   I hope you are working on the 3's and 4's at home.  We need your help to master them.  Play practice is the other significant piece of our weekly effort, but we have also been learning about contractions (fan boys) and prepositions.  We have taken on new cursive letters like e and worked in spelling with consonant clusters and vowel pairs.  In reading, one group has a lit circle with Rules, a book by Cynthia Lord.  Other reading groups work with Brooke. We are all working on comprehension as well as fluency.  We are also planning our class Christmas party/food drive.  We drew Secret Santa names today.  

This was a really fun math trail.  We were working on rounding to the nearest ten last week.  This morning we had a short lesson on rounding to the nearest 100 before setting out on the trail. Happy Halloween from the Brown Funny Bunnies. 

Calaveras:  We've been reading Funny Bones,  the story of Don Posada Guadalupe and Dia de los Muertes.  We made our own calaveras with our cursive name cut outs this week.  Other projects have included "How to..." writing, descriptive paragraphs, verb tense cartoons, landform flap books, reaping basil, composting, planting carrots, place value exploration and regular Math Trail Mondays. Here is a photo blast of recent work.
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And here are our bunnies in action inside and outside...

The biggest news is that we have a new student, Henry.  Our class is full; full of kids, full of joy, full of activity. 

We are working with our new Math Trail Map, "Take Away
Treasure Map."  Each station has things to count, find the 
difference and move to the next station.  When completed, all the differences are added together and then they subtract 2 to get
the final total.  Correct answers get you to the treasure. 

In the process, the kids are outside in the dewy grass in the cool morning on Mondays, warming up for their week.  On Tuesday mornings we are gardening.  Last week we learned about earthworms and got our bin.  The classes were very eager to handle and investigate the worms. Vikki Hutto is teaching the gardening class and so far we have been working with the Polar Bears.

Tuesday afternoon we had our first solar science class with Chris Martin.  We created a scaled down model of the solar system,
which started near the front gate, went across the driveway, 
and almost all the way down the hill. 

We've been completing research in groups about parakeets,
bunnies, goats and ducks, looking for ways to improve their diet and habitat.  We've also been working with a list of spelling and vocabulary words each week that come from our weekly picture book read aloud.   The students will be bringing the spelling list
home in order to have help learning to spell the words.  Our
spelling week will generally go from Wednesday to Wednesday.  Reading groups are working on fluency, accuracy
and comprehension. We have  been working with nouns and
verbs, talking about schema we build from our experiences that we can reach into when we write, and reviewing complete and
incomplete sentences.  We are still reading Flora and Ulysses
​and trying to learn more about squirrels.  Our school internet has
been on the blink since Harvey, so we have run into great
difficulty accessing the "All about Squirrels" videos we had hoped to watch."  We really want to have our internet working again
soon!   Did you know a squirrel nest is called a dray? 

We have 3 ducklings, 2 baby goats, a new parakeet mate for Lola, and a classroom/house rabbit.  We will be learning a lot this semester about caring for our animal friends and how Great Humans take responsibility for living things that depend on us.

In our first week of school, we have decorated our science journals with adaptation photos....

decorated our math journals with tessellation art (using our logical/mathematical skills along with our visual/spatial skills)...

and decorated our literacy notebooks with illuminated lettering of our first name initial.

We began our first read aloud, Flora and Ulysses.  It has amazing vocabulary opportunities.  

We've done 2 math trail adventures so far.  Today the students were able to navigate the trail with a partner.  Last week there were 153 eggs, but today only 20.  What happened?
​answer:  the Friday egg sale. 

Each student wrote a letter of encouragement to themselves to place in their literacy notebook this week.  This was a practice for the letter of encouragement they will write for the students of the coastal classroom we adopt.  We will gather classroom supplies to send once we know what is needed in the classroom we get matched with.  
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We moved our 3 ducklings out to the farmyard today, but first we had to create an enclosure area for them around their new coop.  The baby goats were both trying to help.  

Our latest venture has been to survey our multiple intelligences and graph our unique profile.  This information can help us understand our strengths and give us ideas for leveraging them to assist us in areas that are more challenging for us.  We are talking about which of the intelligences we use most  to succeed at the tasks we are undertaking.  This is just the tip of it all, of course, because a lot more happened than can be covered in one posting.  We are having fun, we are learning, we are enjoying each other, and new friendships are hatching in a peaceful environment...hallelujah.   

Growing Native, our integrated learning theme for this school year is culminating in a Comanche Game for the Tiger class.  Our village was burned down by the Utes, so we had to build new shelters.  We relocated the village at the owl tree.  

The morning we moved our village, the horses across the creek showed an interest in our efforts.  Later that day they were back.  They fit right into our role play.  After building the village, the students mapped the area and included the Rancherios (the tree houses in the Eastern Woods) where the Comanches will go to trade or raid.  

Our poetry month work culminated with a visit from Jim Parker.  Jim worked with all our classes, inspiring the love of poetry as we responded to art and music.  We had a great woodland poetry slam in the afternoon.

Other notable events were our field trip to the Meadows Center (where we explored a wetland and took a glass bottom boat excursion), Earth Day and May Day.  On Earth Day, we serenaded the earth with song, planted two peach trees and tie dyed t-shirts. We had a May Day Market event on campus May 1st.  Our class set up the Dandelion Cafe.  We served dandelion brownies, cookies and dandelion tea, which we loving prepared.

We are now in the final days of the semester, putting finishing touches on Independent Study projects, rehearsing our play, and writing our Comanche stories.  The days are flying past.

Time has been our math focus and now the Tigers can tell time.  They are pretty excited about this new development!  We have been learning our lines and creating the blocking for our Matinee play, "The Native Species Pet Shop."  It emerged from our money math unit where we created a pet shop in our classroom.  It also features our dandelion recipes, another theme from this semester.  

April is poetry month and we have begun writing and listening to poems.  We started with trees and moved on to native species animal subjects...(lots of snakes eating cakes and drinking milkshakes), but we will be working to exhibit our nature science knowledge as we become more comfortable with rhyming word patterns and families.  April is also for April fools...here are a couple of ours.

The students have selected and read a short biography  with a partner and are now writing book reports on their important person.  

Much of our time is spent now on independent study projects.  Many of the students have finished the research, and are on to the demo projects. ​