The Rookery

Night - The Herons wrapped up their night theme by creating constellation blackboards for the rest of the school to enjoy.  When we reflected on the theme we were surprised by how much had done but we also decided we were ready to move on to a new theme.  It's the first time that we've used the panels as part of a theme culmination and we were excited about their potential.

 Fire and Ice

Forest school has been a lot of fun these past two weeks.  Special thanks to Tom who came in and made fire starters with the Herons.  We are excited to do some experiments and see which ones work best – sawdust, paper, dryer lint or combo.  Thanks, too, to Nancy who came in and helped the Herons do some nature photography.  The images are stunning.  We read a great article in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer about taking photos outside and the Herons really took the lessons to heart — look for the rule of thirds, foreground vs. background and interesting textures.

The freezing and thawing of recent days has also prompted a lot of observations of ice and melting.  We have a lot of questions about how ice forms and what happens when it melts and it will form a natural bridge into a study of phases of matter and energy.  In the images below, we are listening to see if there is water running under the drifts in the creek bed.  Then we dug a whole six feet down to see what we found (ice.)

 March Mammal Madness Coming! (compliments of Gabe's newsletter)

The start of March brings in a fun event we’ve been participating in over the past few years, March Mammal Madness! It is a wonderfully absurd competition where animals are imagined to compete in the same format as NCAA basketball’s tournament written by biologists that sprinkle in great facts about the competitors. We already have learned that the maned rat chews up poisonous bark and smears it on itself for protection and, thanks to one of the divisions being full of non-mammals this year, a discussion about tardigrades as the students signed in this morning. “What’s that?” “It’s like an insect.” “Wait, I heard those can live forever!” “…and in outer space!” “But how will it compete? Will the other animal even see it?” “Would it survive even if it was eaten?”

Projects – The Writing Continues

Students have all wrapped up their research and are at various stages of organizing, writing, revising and editing.  We've had some great conversations about introductions and conclusions.  I used an analogy of a tree when talking about organizing one's notes.  When a branch had a lot of leaves (notecards), you can break it into several branches.  Sometimes, you don't find much about a branch and you may choose to cut it off.  The 4th graders took the metaphor literally and created their own trees on paper – a method which worked great for them and which I'll teach in future years!

 Herons Being Herons

We had a great visit with Bereket Haileab on STEM day.  He shared his work in geology and amazed the Herons with images of rocks in his microscopes.  The Herons also wanted me to share this video of a "future predictor" they had made out of Kapla blocks.  The question they asked it, "Will Michelle put the movie of this in her blog?"  The answer was "yes" so…here you go!