MACC Update from Ms. D on April 18th!

Hello Everyone!

So, we have had a great three weeks since Spring Break ended!

We have been doing a lot of talking about biodiversity!

If you missed it today, here are two videos you need to see about biodiversity:

What Does Biodiversity Do for Us?

and

Why is Biodiversity So Important?

Here’s a quick summary of some of the great work we have been doing!:

  • We have a LOAD of great books in the classroom to read about biodiversity, biomes, ecosystems, fossils, evolution, animals, birds, and nature! Thank you to the District Library for adding to our collection. Check them out!
  • We learned all about taxonomy and have spent time classifying or grouping animals, making careful observations, and talking about animal or plant characteristics and adaptations!
  • We have been doing the walking curriculum, looking at our surrounding flora and fauna, practicing careful observation, and getting great exercise and fresh air outdoors!
  • We have learned that our playground has blackberry bushes newly seeded behind the portable, small plants called plantains that can be used for medicine, roly polys or wood bugs (that are crustaceans, not bugs), parsley, brown ants, and more. We look forward to continuing our efforts to map the flora and fauna here, as we talk about mapping this unit!
  • We went through almost 100 poetry books and anthologies to seek different literary devices and poetry structure, such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, repetition, metaphor, simile, quatrain, and more.
  • We played a card game called PHYLO that helps us to learn about our local B.C. biodiversity, and we are working on a tough venn diagram puzzle about taxonomy. Some of those puzzles are hard and open to some debate! 
  • We discussed shapes we found in nature and talked about characteristics of 3D shapes. We built shapes out of bristol board, identified angle types, and learned to use protractors to measure angles in our classroom. 
  • We are doing math challenges from Area Mazes, using our understanding of how to find area to determine missing numbers in the puzzles! The lower number puzzles are fairly easy, but only one person has figured out puzzle #97. Keep trying!
  • And we are applying grade level math curriculum to Animal Math, which is a set of problems designed to illustrate math we would use in talking about the animal world (area, perimeter, charts, graphs, financial literacy, coordinates, triangles, algebraic expressions, and variables. 
  • And we are reading The Skeleton Tree by Iain Lawrence, practicing making careful connections, recording new vocabulary, and asking questions as we read, as we strengthen our reading comprehension skills. It is fun reading as a whole group so we can stop and ask questions about this exciting tale of survival on the Alaskan/B.C. coast.

I am looking forward to our field trip to the UBC Biodiversity Museum and Pacific Museum of Earth Science on Tuesday, April 23rd.

Also coming up are a visit to the GVRD Lower Seymour Watershed on May 8th, as well as a visit to our classroom from the O.W.L. rescue organization on May 9th. We will get to see an owl and a hawk up close! FYI, there will be a fee of $8 associated with the visit, with a notice to follow directly after on May 9th, and the money goes toward the upkeep and care of rescue birds at their organization.

We will continue our WALK 30 and Walking Curriculum Challenge through May 10th! Keep counting those minutes at home!

Also, everyone needs to go to the public library for their independent project! I am collecting books in the classroom for most of you. Many thanks to Ms. Ho, our school librarian, for helping us to gather resources from secondary schools and other elementary libraries, and to the District Library for resources, too! All of those books stay in the classroom. Go the library and talk to your local research librarian to ask for help finding even more information. Regular time for research will be given during the week.

More on Twitter, so please do check for daily pictures and updates there!

Stay tuned for the next blog post on our animal project!

Ms. D