Our Week in Pictures

Here's a look at what we've been up to!

We....

 started polishing some rocks in our rock tumbler,

 practiced writing the word, "Rock,"

 painted rocks,

 listened to Lisa Ralls as she explained her rock and fossil collection,

 examined rocks and fossils with magnifying glasses,

 wrote questions for Lisa (each student had his/her own question), asked the questions, and wrote the answers,

and enjoyed our first field trip to Oakwood Park! (I didn't get any pictures of our actual rock activities during this field trip, which is a major bummer. We made a map of our route to the park and as we found rocks and added them to our bucket we marked the location on the map. When we arrived at the park, we talked about how those rocks got where they were. This helped us answer our question, "How do rocks get everywhere?")

I want to send out a huge thank you to Robin Charlson and Carrie Peterson for coming with us on our field trip yesterday! It helps so much to have a few extra adults while we are out of the classroom. 

We'll be continuing with our rock study next week. The kiddos seem to have learned so much with this study already, and I'm excited to see how much more they can learn. 

Have a fantastic weekend!

Field Trips!

Phew! We survived our field trip on Thursday, and most of us were exhausted by the end of the day! Let me tell you how it went!

Our original goal was the watch the elementary kids at recess to see what they do with balls...Unfortunately, for the morning class, we got a late start and no one was out for recess when we got there. That's okay, though. We were able to see some big kids on our walk back to school. Man! Can they bounce their four-square balls high! The afternoon class did get to watch the big kids at recess. We saw all kinds of cool things to do with balls. We made sure to take some notes about what we saw.

 The favorite ball activity for the kids to watch was the group of big kids who tied a jump rope around a ball and hung it from the jungle gym. How creative!

Next, We walked over to the skate park. Here, we raced our balls down the ramps to see which ones rolled the fastest and which ones rolled the farthest. We made sure to try out all of the ramps before we were finished.

Since the morning class wasn't able to take notes about what the big kids do with balls at recess, they took notes on their experiments at the skate park.

We ended our trip at Oakwood Park where we did some more experimenting. We sent the balls down the slide, down the stairs, over the bridge, and through the spirals. Some balls definitely worked better than others. We also had a little bit of time to just play at the park. There are so many ways to build gross motor skills by climbing, pulling, balancing, and running at the park!

It was a great day full of excellent learning experiences! Hopefully, the kids had as much fun as I had!