March 18, 2011

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We all wore all the green we could find. We counted and found out we wore 94 pieces of green! We like the green, curly wig and thought it was cool. We had our own personal leprechaun too! Too bad our leprechaun didn't have any gold.  Cam brought in sparkling shamrocks and we each got one. 
We practiced our Star Words on the IWB,  and shamrocks were covering the words. We pulled Star Words out of a leprechaun's hat too. We had green apples and green grapes for snack. Some of us brought a green jello snack and a green shamrock cookie snack.  We heard a story about leprechauns and we wrote about leprechauns. We persuaded the leprechauns to give us their gold. We went up to visit our principal to wish her a Happy St. Patrick's Day, and we took a picture with her. We gave her a sparkling shamrock too. We made hats that said, "Happy St. Patrick's Day" and we got green glow-in-the-dark bracelets. We had an amazing St. Patrick's Day!





March 9, 2011

Whales


We built a pilot whale skeleton. We looked at pictures and diagrams to know how to do it. We used all the bones in the spine. The bones in the spine are called vertebrae. The whale has 7 vertebrae in its neck, just like us. All mammals have 7 neck vertebrae; even a giraffe! The vertebrae in the whale's tail have extra bones, called chevrons. The chevrons help the whales muscles to work better.

The whale's skull was huge! The holes on top of the whale's skull are its blowholes so it can breathe.

We were surprised to find out that whales have 5 phalanges, just like us! Whales have a scapula, just like us. Whales have ribs, just like us, but their ribs are much bigger.

We saw baleen. Baleen is what is in the mouth of whales that don't have teeth. The orca tooth was really big! 

Thank you to our PTA for getting us this wonderful program!



March 1, 2011

Doubles Facts

This is our first photography book. We chose the things to use to show the doubles facts, and we arranged them on a piece of colored paper. We got to pick the color. Then we took all of the photographs ourselves. Some of us had used a digital camera before, but for some of us it was the first time. It was FUN! We hope to make more books like this one.

We each got our own copy of the book to take home too.