Migration, Chinese New Year, Whale Authors, and More!

This week the Whales dived into their study on Migration. We talked about what migration is and the whales picked their migration animal that they will be researching and presenting to the class. Next week the Whales will be looking at the different migration routes of their migrating animals. We will be mapping their routes, looking at short and long distances. This week we also touched on cardinal points (north, south, east, west). We talked about in Winter many migrating animals migrate south where it is warmer. In the Spring, many of the migrating animals migrate back to the North. The Whales are so excited to learn about each others migrating animals.

Wow! We had a publishing Week in writers workshop! So many Whales finished their stories and published their books. We read their published books during lunch and celebrated each others accomplishments! We had stories about Christmas trees, Snowstorms, Rhinos named Reggy, and fun times at school. The Whales are stretching themselves in their writing. We used Mo Willems as inspiration and thought about adding speech bubbles to our stories to tell the reader how our characters are feeling.

On Friday we had Ms. Rita and Mr. Vincent come in and talk about the Lunar New Year (Chinese New Year). They shared with us the story of the Monster Nian, and the story of the Chinese Zodiac. The Whales learned that if they were born in 2017 their Chinese Zodiac sign is the Rooster, and if they were born in 2018 their Chinese Zodiac sign is the Dog. We learned that the Lunar New Year is centered around removing the bad and the old and welcoming the good and new. The Whales were even gifted a special decoration to hang in their home!