This week was all about KITES and CRANES, life cycles, and celebrating SPRING!
Monday morning brought a wonderful surprise! Our butterflies hatched! We observed them eating and flying, and journaled our observations. We also looked at slides of butterflies through the microscope.
We had the opportunity to have Middle School Math Buddies come to our class and teach us an MCC (Math in a Cultural Context) lesson on Patterns and Parkas. We worked on symmetry and repeating patterns. It was nice to have so many teachers and helpers, and the kids were so proud of what they had created!
Our next adventure was a trip to the school greenhouse! The kids planted seeds, which they will take home at the end of the year.
Jesse is watching our ladybugs fly away into the greenhouse, to help with pest control.
We also got to pick and eat some delicious carrots!
As we continue our study of plants in science, we celebrated the first flowers to come up in Tok this spring... the Pasque Flowers, or crocuses, are blooming!!!! We dissected flowers and learned about their parts.
We put some parts of the flowers under the microscope and saw some flower petal cells! When the kids were looking through the microscope I heard things like, "Whoa, cool!", "That's amazing!", and "I can't believe my eyes in that microscope!"
And this is the face of a kid who just saw cells for the first time. This is why I teach.
The World Champion of three Native Youth Olympic events came to Tok School to help the kids learn how to do some NYO events. Here the kids are doing the Eskimo Stick Pull!
In this video the kids are practicing the Seal Hop! Give it a try!
This is Autumn Ridley, NYO World Champion in three events, doing the Alaskan one foot high kick.
KITES AND CRANES WEEK:
We did many activities this week as part of our collaboration with our Book Buddies, studying the book, Sadako and the 1,000 Paper Cranes. We studied Japanese culture, wrote Haiku poetry, and tried Sushi!
We also made kites in math to study shapes and work on fractions of 1/4. We added tails to our kites in a color pattern.
Friday was our Kites and Cranes field trip to Mt. Fairplay! Thank you to Tetlin NWR for helping with this event! We saw cranes circling overhead before we even left town, and another flock of about 300 spiraling upward as we drove to Mt. Fairplay! When we first arrived we just enjoyed the warm spring sunshine and just a slight breeze. We all got lots of exercise running back and forth to get the kites up in the air!!!
The kids also had a great time exploring and gathering pussy willows and other treasures!
We all enjoyed a picnic lunch and a bonfire with s'mores. There was stiff competition on who could roast the best marshmallow, but others went for quantity instead of quality, roasting marshmallows on special triple forked marshmallow sticks!
To complete the day, we had a storm blow in, dropping some snowflakes, but also bringing the WIND! Finally, the kites soared and soared... until we reluctantly pulled them in and headed back home. It was a wonderful celebration of kites and cranes... and SPRING!
I'll leave you with one of our class Haiku poems... this poem was written by the kids. Their beautiful image, their words, their ideas.
Kites look like jewels
Shimmering so beautiful
Look at my kite fly.
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