Animals in Winter

The Whales are back in action after a restful Winter Break. In a community discussion, on Tuesday, the Whales were eager to share about the memories they made during break. Some Whales traveled to see family, some went to the Mt. and played in the snow, while others stayed cozy and warm at home. It was so fun to see their smiles as they talked about their adventures.

On Tuesday, we started a new unit of study on Animals in Winter. First up, is hibernation! The Whales selected a Pacific Northwest animal to research over the next couple of weeks. They will be writing a research paper, doing a scientific illustration, engineering their animals hibernation site, and presenting to classrooms and families on their animals. This week we began reading about our animals and writing our research papers. We will continue to work on their papers next week as well. The Whales are proving to be amazing scientists. They are asking great questions and are deeply focused on their animals.

As we get closer to the 100th day of school, the Whales continue to practice counting to 100 by 1’s and groups of 10’s. This week we did a counting by 10 counting circle. We continue to talk about place value. While doing calendar, we identify how many ten sticks and little ones make up our day number. Thursday we had the 76th day of school. The Whales identified that we have 7 ten sticks and 6 little ones. We counted by tens and added on our little ones. During classroom choice, the Whales have been playing Bear Den Math. They start with ten bears. One person closes their eyes, while the other Whale hides some of the bears in the den. The person opens their eyes and has to figure out how many bears went in the den. They then have to write that number sentence on their worksheet. At the beginning of the week, the Whales thought it was a bit tricky. By Thursday, they were pros at figuring out how many bears were in the den!

In literacy, the Whales have been practicing their vowels! The Whales are learning the short and long vowel sounds. We have unlocked 5 vowel sounds in our vowel valley. The Whales are so proud of themselves! We have also been practicing reading and writing words with an -s ending. Sometimes these words can be tricky but the Whales have been doing a fabulous job listening for all the letter sounds in these words. Our heart word list continues to grow! This week we added the word “see”.

What a fun Friday the Whales had! We had a math morning playing Uno, checkers, math number coloring, addition yahtzee, and shut the box with Ms. Brooke! At Friday Summit, Landon shared with the school that the Whales are studying animals that hibernate in the Winter. It was so fun to hear what all of the classrooms are up to! During our outside time, we had an extra surprise! The Sea Lions (3rd/4th graders), set up an obstacle course for the Whales! The Whales had such a good time letting out energy doing different outside activities. When the Whales came in we talked about our thoughts about their outside time. So many Whales said “I made a new friend!”. They absolutely loved getting to know the 3rd and 4th graders.