Amazing Animal Projects!

Today day we showcased all of our hard work for the past few weeks.  When I started this project with my firsties, I had a list of expectations....

1. Log-in to Google Drive

2. Locate answers to the questions from the Google Doc

3. Type answers into the document

4. Have 4th graders help students edit, locate pictures, and customize presentation.

5. Share animal projects

Well, my Wonderful Whales SHATTERED these expectations.  Here is what they ACTUALLY did...

1. Learned to log-in to Google Drive independently

2. Located answers to questions from the Google Doc from multiple resources

3. Typed answers into the document with capitalization and punctuation

4. Located pictures independently and pasted into presentation

5. Edited and revised their presentation with minor suggestions from Mrs. Wanke

6. Customized their presentation with 4th graders

7. Practiced presenting animal projects to the class

8. Peer edited each others presentations

9.  Presented to class and parents with confidence.

Needless to say, I am one proud teacher!  I can't wait to do more of this next year.

Using the Chrome books to log-in, research, and edit our presentations.

Check out our presentations!

We survived our presentation!

Check back tomorrow for more pictures and videos!

Good Bye Pumpkin Jack

Well, we decided today was our last observation of our dear friend Pumpkin Jack. Check out our observations and all the changes that Pumpkin Jack went through this year!

 

Yuck, look at all the moisture inside! It is hard to believe that when we put the pumpkins in with DRY dirt!

Even more disgusting when you look inside.  We made sure to plug our nose...we didn't want to find out the hard way how it smelt.

We ceremoniously said goodbye to our friend.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Day 1

Dry dirt and nice orange Jack-o-Lanterns.

Day 18

Moisture and mold, but still our pumpkins are orange and somewhat round.

Day 32

Lots of mold and the pumpkins are beginning to lose their shape. Not so orange any more.

Day 70

What a muddy stinky mess! This is where I began to question my experiment choice.

Student Interviews

Brookfield Zoo Trip

It looks like everyone had such a fun time on our field trip to the Brookfield Zoo.  I loved getting all the pictures from your scavenger hunts.  If you have any more pictures, please send them my way!

Animal Classification

We are getting ready for our field trip to the Brookfield Zoo tomorrow. Today we talked about animal classifications.
Today, we each became an expert on one specific animal classification...fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, or mammal.

Then, we got into groups of 5 with a person representing each classification of animal.  We each shared   the characteristics of the animal classification we became an expert on.

We also watched a BrainPop Jr. video on animal classification.

Yesterday, we sorted animals into four categories, skin, scales, feather, and fur.  Today, we decided what animal classification would have skin, scales, feather, and fur.  We used our new found knowledge of the characteristics for each classification.  We were surprised that some animal classifications fit into two categories.  Did you know that birds have feathers and scales?!

We also explored a great website, called Kid's Corner, with lots of information about the classification of animals. 

Test your knowledge with this awesome game and see how well you do at identifying the characteristics of animals.

Why I Should go to Second Grade

We have had some awesome speeches, and so far everyone gets to go to second grade!  Judge Wanke has been quite lenient.

Check out my speech...

First Grade has been fun, don't bet me wrong. But I'm really ready for 2nd grade.  Thanks to the best teacher in the world, Mrs. Wanke.  I'm ready to read harder books, write more in my journal, and solve harder math problems.  I promise to keep using my stamina and work even harder in 2nd grade!

Art Party

What do you get when you combine, Mrs. Gocken, watercolor paints, and Alka Seltzer?
Exploding Art!

Candling our Duck Eggs

Today we did the first candling of our duck eggs.  Our eggs have been incubating for 8 days now.

Our incubator hard at work, keeping our duck eggs at 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is what the inside of the duck egg looks like at day 8.

When we candled the eggs today we were looking for veins and possibly some slight movement of the developing duck.  If we didn't see any veins then we knew that the egg was not fertilized and there would be no duck.  

Based upon our observations, we predicted the following

Egg 1:  no veins, no duck

Egg 2: veins, duck

Egg 3: veins, duck

Egg 4: no veins, no duck

Egg 5: veins, duck

Egg 6, veins, duck

Egg 7: no veins, no duck

Egg 8: veins, movement, duck!

Egg 9: no veins, no duck

Egg 10: no veins, no duck

Below is a YouTube video of a duck egg candling at Day 7.    She gives lots of good information about candling.

We have also been hard at working learning all we can about ducks.

My attempt at humor.

We have been reading articles about duck.  Then, we have to answer questions about ducks and find evidence from the text that supports our answers.  

One question was, Could a duck survive in Antarctica?  We said no, and because we looked back in the article we were able to support our answer by adding... because ducks are found all over the world except in very cold places.  Some ducks even migrate during winter.

This is the article about ducks that we read.  Notice how we highlighted key pieces of information!

This is the fun fraction activity we did with ducks!