Kites and Cranes

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!" 

 Here are the cells through the 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.

Sparkles

I have to start out this week with some quotes from your kids.  We read a story about the Conceited Apple Blossom, who thought it was better than all other flowers, especially the dandelions in the field.  At the end of the story I asked the kids to turn and talk to each other at their tables, and come up with what they thought was the lesson of the story.  Here is what they came up with:

"There are sparkles in all of us."  "Everyone is beautiful in their own way."  "You make you who you are."  "It doesn't matter if you are beautiful, it matters who you are."

So profoundly true.


We had a wonderful week watching our critters change!  Our ladybugs turned into adults this week, and we are going to release them into the school's greenhouse on Monday.   The kids also excitedly journaled about their caterpillars turning into Chrysalides!  The students noticed that some of them began shaking as we were hanging them in the butterfly house!  They were so curious as to why they were doing this, and I love that one of them brought me my computer and said, "Let's look it up!"  So we did... and found that when chrysalides feel movement around them they sometimes begin to shake as a defense against predators!  I tell you, I learn something every day, right along with my students!

We had another super cute visit from one of our classmate's pets!  Alianna earned the Pet Shop card, and so she brought in her Aunt's puppy to show the class.  Thank you Ali!  She was adorable!

I am so thrilled with the class's progress in writing this year!  We are still working on the District's curriculum, The 6 Traits of Writing.  This week we had fun making play-doh (using math to double the recipe together) and then using our play-doh to come up with great Ideas to write about.  The stories were all so unique and creative, from starfish, to talking hot dogs, to Moon Queens!  

Another of the Six Traits we focused on this week was Organization.  First the kids made their own PB&J's (or PB's or just J's, as the case may be...), and then they wrote a How To piece on the steps needed to make a sandwich.  The did a wonderful job and had a delicious treat after their stories were done!

Next Friday we have a wonderful opportunity to go to Mt. Fairplay to celebrate the return of migratory birds to Alaska!  We are going with Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge and our 5th Grade Book Buddies to fly kites and HOPEFULLY see some cranes flying overhead! Parents and family are more than welcome to come along, just let me know so that I can grab you a picnic lunch.  This week, in preparation for our Kites and Cranes Day, we and our Book Buddies will be reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, and doing some studies of Haiku poetry, Japanese culture, and paper folding!  

Have a great week, and remember, "There are sparkles in everyone!"  Don't lose your sparkles!

Cool Critters!

Spring is here, and we are enjoying discovering how the world wakes up from winter!  We are anxiously watching and waiting as our new critters get ready to hatch and go through metamorphosis!  

Our Painted Lady Butterfly caterpillars arrived, and the kids put caterpillar food into little cups and each chose 2 caterpillars to be their very own. 

We are keeping an observation journal about how they are growing, molting, and changing!

We also are waiting for our praying mantis egg case to hatch!  It is supposed to have over 100 praying mantises in it!

Here is Ladybug Land!  We watched them turn from larvae to pupa last week!

And finally, we have chukar partridge eggs that should be hatching the middle of May!  

Of course, we still have our old pal Eragon, the Bearded Dragon!  The kids enjoy feeding him his worms.

We spent last week learning about another creature that we DON'T have in our classroom, thank goodness!  We studied about dinosaurs in reading, and imagined and wrote about what it would be like if they DID come back to school!   We read some fantasy and some reality books about dinosaurs, and learned about fossils and made some plaster fossils of our own.  They turned out great!

We also read a story about real dinosaur tracks and then made dinosaur tracks of our own all the way to the playground!

We got to celebrate Easter (a little bit late) with our Book Buddies on Tuesday.  Our 5th grade Buddies found some eggs outside on the playground that the Easter Bunny had hidden, and we all went on an egg hunt to try to match up lowercase and uppercase letters.  Then it was on to ANOTHER hunt, this time for jelly beans in the library!  The Buddies had a great time munching on jelly beans and reading books together. 

We celebrated Earth Day all week by writing and talking about what we could do to help the Earth.  We also made shaving cream painted Earths... very gooey, but lots of fun.  They were beautiful.

We combined Earth Day with our study of electricity by learning about the different ways to make electricity, and the pros and cons of each.  Then we did an experiment to find out which materials conduct electricity better.  The kids were GREAT little scientists, coming up with their hypotheses, then designing their own experiments to test them, and recording the results.  I was so impressed with all of their labeled drawing of their circuits and the sentences they wrote!

We had the most delicious math class EVER when we took a field trip to Fast Eddies on Friday!  Thank you so much to the Youngs for putting together a fun lesson for us on pizza fractions!  First the kids had to spread HALF of their cheese on their WHOLE pizza.  Then they put different toppings on each HALF or FOURTH of their pizza.  Then they sprinkled on the other HALF of the cheese.

While the pizzas were cooking the kids got a sneak peak into Nick's huge pizza oven!

Then for the best part!  Our pizzas came out, and we got to enjoy eating FOURTHS!

THANK YOU FAST EDDY'S, Nick and Amy Young, and Loretta Fitting for helping!