Aquarium

Boneless, translucent,

We undulate, undulate,

Gelatinously.

--Jack Prelutsky

While my group was admiring some moon jellies on our New England Aquarium trip last week, I thought of a Jack Prelutzky poem we had recently read together in class and I was inspired to recite the first line of it-- "Boneless, translucent"...and then several students chimed in and finished it in unison! It was a magical moment this teacher won't soon forget. 

We had lots of other great moments that day, including...

There was a significant increase in volume and a palpable excitement on the bus as the city sights of Boston came into view. :)

The students really were "ray whisperers!" (We had watched a video about how to be calm and quiet and hold our hands just below the surface of the water in order to be able to touch a ray as it swam by, and boy were these first graders good at it! I think all our groups visited the ray touch tank multiple times.)

I heard several comments such as, "this was the best day of the whole year!" and "this is amazing!"

We read signs, we observed penguins and an octopus, an anaconda, eels, sea turtles, sea lions, and leafy sea dragons.

I apologize I didn't get pictures of everyone as we were split up into small groups. I tried to snap pictures of our class members whenever I could. Here are a few pictures (and a haiku, above) from the day.

Shape Studies

In our last math unit of the year, we have been working hard to distinguish 2-D and 3-D shapes, and to describe them using defining attributes. We have been playing math games involving trapezoids, rhombuses, hexagons, and triangles.

We searched our classroom, and also went on a "shape walk" around the school one day, looking for examples of 3-D/solid shapes. It was interesting that cones and pyramids didn't come up often, but we saw many rectangular prisms and spheres!

We are learning that some arrangements of 6 squares fold up to make a cube, and some do not!

But we haven't been only studying shapes in math time. We've been keeping our brains strong with operations as well, particularly focusing on adding or subtracting ten from any number. This coincides with a deeper understanding of place value. We play games like "pop" to practice the counting sequences starting at a number like 2 and then adding 10, adding 10, adding 10: 2, 12, 22, 32, and so on. Our whole calendar pattern for the month of May has had us "hopping" around the number grid, adding or subtracting tens or ones or both. The students have also had fun completing a few "hidden picture" grids, where they need to solve a +10 or -10 problem, then color the solution in a certain color to discover a picture.