Pond life

One of our team organised this great visit from Ecolinc.

They are a free service to schools in our area and reside in Bacchus Marsh.

They do trips out to schools as well as schools going to them.

There is even funding to have free buses to get there!

 

The children got to look at pond creatures, capture them carefully, look at them under the microscope and find them on the sheet to see what they are called.

 

We also got to play a pond life game on iPads!

 

 

 

We had a great time!

We have also booked another visit or next year - one to come here and one to  go there.

IT IS FREE and fits beautifully into our topic of inquiry.

 

Word Work using an Animal Theme and Diary of a Wombat

So introducing Diary of a Wombat. Read 'Diary of a Baby Wombat' and then create your own diary. Choose your animal and find out what they might do in a day. The book 'Diary of a Baby Wombat' is funny and is great for predicting and seeing how an author creates a sense of humour for the reader using short sentences.

Updated 2017 - if you already own this please re download to get the extra tasks.

Click here - to see more detail

And introducing my new Animal Word Work small booklet

Students will be able to work independently through these tasks while creating a sense of how to use sentences, lists and seeing/using words based on animals.

Wildlife Park

Last week we went to the Wildlife Park here in our hometown of Ballarat. At school all our kids have been looking at using tally marks and graphing as well as animals and how they behave and live on our planet.

New skill for me - uploading a video to my blog. Wow - take video, upload to youtube, share (but share embed), copy html code, switch to blog and HTML on a post, post and then cross my fingers and everything else that when I publish you get to see two koalas moving, eating and hear our kids ohhing and aahhing in the background! So please be patient if it didn't work........

There are also some photos of koalas, kangaroos, a very shy echidna and a crocodile.

The really big croc died just recently.  There are also eagles, lizards, snakes, turtles, tortoises, frogs and Tasmanian Devils that I haven't got photos of here.

We also took our tally marks of animals that we saw. We took these back to school and then made our graphs from them. There were way more kanagroos then anything else. Some of our high achievers tried to have a code - 1 square = 5 animals. Pretty darn clever!

Down on the farm

My students have been working on farm animals and getting to know what farm animals do for us.

 

Here are some pictures of my grade using some of the tasks in my 'Down on the Farm' pack.

 

This work allows for differentiation and different groups can have a different focus.

 

Here are two children matching baby animals to their mums - as well as matching names of animals.

 

This Venn Diagram is comparing a pig to a sheep. The fun part was listening to them decide where to put pieces of information.

 

This task asks the student to place information/facts around the animal.

 

 

 

I have placed a series of cards in the pack - where depending on the animal the task is slightly different. So this pig one has - words hat start with 'p', words that rhyme with pig and words that end in 'g'. They loved writing on them in markers.

 

This task is about four animals and adding the labels that belong. So cow has leather, beef, milk, yoghurt. Again I loved the conversation when they were deciding where to put some labels. I also loved hearing them work out where they went - some were surprised about leather and didn't like the fact my boots may have come from a cow - funny!!!!

 

So if you are doing farm animals - your kids will love this.

 

 

Pets and templates for recording

Click here to see more in our TpT store

I have been adding to this pack as we go and have spent about an hour on it today and it is done - polished and published.

Click here to check it out

One hour in our Prep room

This is what happens in one hour in our space!

 

During Discovery Learning we have opportunities that our students choose from to help explore what they know about Living and Non Living.

 

We have life drawing of stick insects. Pascale has a cabinet of them - this one is Grand Daddy. We (well the other teachers, not me) remove two from the cabinet and the children draw them. We have magnifying glasses for them to see detail. Our Preppies are even trying to label the parts of the stick insects. After the day I had yesterday - these little critters even poo!

We have a tub of plastic animals that we use for drawing as well. They are looking at the proportion of the animal and trying to draw them accurately.

 

I have posted a similar photo of our 'How many legs?' Our students are loving this and if they choose this task they are adding a sentence about the animal this week.

 

Then we have children making puppets and putting on small plays with them.

This long piece of paper contains living things in a row. They are drawing and then adding numerals underneath. They decided to combine their number lines and see how many they could draw. The task is now to get the sequence of numerals right. It stretched from one end of our room to another and around furniture.

The blocks and animals are about making habitats. What would the dinosaurs have lived in? If they use farm animals they make a farm.

The IWB lets children explore making habitats and lots of other things using this UK site - sorry about the quality of the photo.

It is a busy time - noisy - challenging - and worth every bit of it. I will share the planning later next week and how we store the 'stuff' so that children set up and pack up.

What the......

I am not comfortable with animals - so you may be laughing by the end of the post! That is okay as I am laughing about this now. ( Well just a little)

 

I often blog about visitors to my room - but seriously! I think I am a positive person, I hope I respond to situations in a polite manner - but I will be honest today I struggled. So I think that this is my first blog that has a different slant. Did I mention how uncomfortable I am with animals?

 

We are doing living and non living - so one of our team members organised a farm visit to come to our school. We all agreed that this was a great idea - notes went home, money come in and today was the day. Not okay with animals!(Have I mentioned that?)

 

Due to the bad weather Ballarat had today (beyond our control), my grade had the animals visit our room. We had chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, sheep and goats. Remember how I feel about animals?

 

So twenty minutes later we had poop, wee and hay on our floor. Seriously - I am not an animal person!

 

And I work with my kids on that floor. My reading, writing, maths and everything else will have to happen in the hallway!!!!!!

 

Our room smelt like a barn!!!!!!!!!

 

I had to touch a goat and herd it away from furniture, the sheep was escaping and the rabbits were wet and smelt! Poop and wee everywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Then the animal farm left - one of our teachers got her rabbit out and then a parent bought her dog for show and tell - I wanted to run away. I cannot take responsibility for what I said or did from 1.00pm to 3.30pm!

 

My kids went home - they had a lovely day. I looked at my floor and thought - are you kidding me?

 

Our lovely cleaner and Principal - knowing how I feel (after they laughed) got a carpet cleaner in and now my carpet is smelling like roses.

 

I could have hugged the man doing my carpet.

It's a Wild Wild World

                                                             This coming term our team will be exploring Living/Non LIving and Animals/Plants and I can't wait.

I have already completed a unit on Farm Animals and now I have this one on It's a Wild Wild World.

This has references to our Australian Curiculum as well as USA Common Core.

The pack contains 63 pages. There are 7 pages to use to establish a word wall.

A KWHL to record what your students know and want to know.

Pages to  record what you know about jungle animals and then use this in the writing.

Use the matrix to gather data on animals and what they eat, where they live and what coverings they have.

Your students will learn to take 
notes and record facts.

Learn to write an information report, record your opinions and compose narratives about animals geting loose.