Hibernation Station

 Today we learned about hibernation, animals that hibernate, and the importance of a properly insulated shelter for the animals to hibernate safely during the winter.  

Mrs. Wanke shared that we were going to use what we learned to create a shelter for animals to hibernate.  First, we went over key vocabulary.  

Next, Mrs. Wanke shared with us the STEM challenge.   

 

Before Mrs. Wanke would give us our materials, we had to create a blue print with our partner.  

Once our plan was complete, it was time to build.  We worked very hard to build the best structure for our animals!

Check out our finished structures!

 

Apples Apples and More Apples

 Last week was all about apples.  We started the week by reading the story How Do Apples Grow. 

Before reading the book, we shared our prior knowledge, or as Mrs. Wanke calls it, our schema. We wrote our prior knowledge down on Post-It notes and added them to the schema section of our chart.   After reading the story, we added new learning to our chart.  Mrs. Wanke explained that this new learning will eventually become part of our schema.  PROOF we are learning and growing our brains!

Later in the week we read How to Grow an Apple Pie and See the World.  

As we listened to this story we followed along on a map of the world.  It was fun to see all the places around the world. 

To end our week we made our own mini apple pies, apple turnovers! YUMMY!

Moon Phases

 We read the story The Moon Seems to Change Shape.  This story explains to us why the moon goes from a full moon, to a sliver, to nothing.  Click on the book to hear this story. 

The moon phases can be a bit confusing, so to help make this less confusing we made the moon phases out of Oreo cookies!  This was so much fun and super YUMMY!

Check out these adorable smiles!

3-2-1 Blast Off, Into a Week about Space

We started off our week by blasting off into space.  We made sure to wear the proper helmet so we could breath in outer space. 

With our astronaut log books in our hands we traveled to each planet in our solar system to conduct our research.  

Once back on Earth we shifted our focus to Earth's moon.  We learned how even thought the shape of the moon changes in the night sky, it isn't the moon that is changing...it actually isn't changing at all.  The moon rotated around the Earth, so at different times during the month the sun's light shines differently on the moon making it appear that the moon is changing shapes.  We had fun showing this with Oreo cookies!

 

We had so much fun this week exploring space and the moon.  Last week we had a blast learning about Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut.  We watch some of his video's.  Check them out below.