Wrapping Up Our Gerbil Exploration

Hello family and friends!

It's been another great week in the Aalva class! We spent the week finishing up our study on gerbils. We have asked many questions and found our answers. We've all learned a lot! Even though we are ending this study, I know we will continue to come back to the subject of gerbils as we observe them in our room throughout the year.

Through our study of gerbils this week, we decided to open up our very own pet store! We worked together as a class to come up with a graph of all the things we thought a pet store should sell. We discussed different types of animal food, toys, beds, and grooming supplies. After making our list, I asked the question, "How are we going to get all these materials to sell?". The first response was, "Go to the store and buy them for us, Ms. Rachael!". A very logical answer! But, after a discussion we decided it would be best if we made all these things ourselves. This took us on a mini adventure of project making. We provided the kids with a large supply of materials such as boxes, yarn, glue, scissors, clay, feathers, beads, etc. We told them to use their imaginations and make us a pet store. The results were wonderful! We took everything off the shelves in our housekeeping center and replaced them with animal crates, aquariums, pet toys, food, and even more clay pets. After each item was made, the child priced the object, tagged it, and put it up for sale.

In order to have a functioning store, we decided we would probably need a cash register and some money. We pulled out some pretend bills and discussed the difference between the one, five, and ten dollar bills. We kept all the priced items at $10.00 and under so that we could work on recognizing the numbers 0-10. We were also able to incorporate some addition and subtraction. For example, we worked together to figure out how many one dollar bills we would need to buy a $4.00 cage. Or, how could we combine our bills in order to buy a $9.00 aquarium. We've rotated throughout the week between the roles of working the cash register and being the costumer. The store was a great success! We will be keeping it up next week since there is still an interest in it from the kids.

We also did some research of our gerbils this week through reading workshop. We learned many types of foods that gerbils like as well as facts about baby gerbils. We found out that baby gerbils are born deaf, blind, and hairless. Their skin is so thin that you can tell the color of their eyes before they open and you can even see milk inside their belly so the mother knows when it's time to feed them again! We also found out that a grown gerbil measures about 9 inches long. This fact lead to a fascination with measuring tapes! Some of us went around our room measuring objects and writing our results on clipboards. We were able to compare the length of objects to our gerbil length. We were able to talk about which was smaller, larger, shorter, taller, wider, etc. We also decided it would be interesting to compare our height in inches compared to the height of our 9 inch gerbil. We measured everyone and wrote our name and height (in inches) on the chart for comparisons. It's hanging up in the hallway across from our classroom door if you'd like to check it out.

Lastly, we finished our KWL chart. We went back and discussed the facts that we already knew. Then, we read back over the questions that we had originally asked. For each question, we discussed rather or not we felt that we had answered it throughout our 2 weeks study. Finally, we added to our chart all the things that we had learned about our new furry friends. I was so impressed with the kids. They were naming things that I had completely forgotten about! It was encouraging for all of us to look at our completed chart and see the wealth of knowledge we had gained. During our open house this week, a parent asked if these studies were done individually or as a group. It was a great question and I felt that it would be worth discussing as we wrap up our first study. These explorations that we do are done as a group. There were plenty of times when the kids choose to venture out on their own or in small groups to look at our gerbil books or write or make objects for our pet store or measurements. These explorations are great ways for us to model for them ways to research and ways to expand on their previous knowledge. The explorations we do throughout the year will be done as a whole group. At the end of the year we will ask each child to do their own exploration and become an expert on a topic of their choosing. At this point, the kids will have had a large amount of modeling and experience learning how to become an expert. We will still guide them in their study but it will be done on an individual level. They can then teach their peers and teachers about the subject they've become experts on! Have no fear though...there will be no homework...it'll all be done at school :)

As we have wrapped up gerbils, we've talked a lot about the healthy fruits and vegetables that the gerbils enjoy eating. We thought it would be fun to do some taste testing ourselves to find out what types of healthy food we enjoy too. This will start Monday. We're excited to see where the kids take us this week!

Here are a handful of standards met this week...

Approaching to Learning:

Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questions and adding ideas.
Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps

Social & Emotional:

Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.
Express fears and concerns to familiar adults.

Language & Literacy:

Incorporate favorite parts of literary texts into play activities.
Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
See information by looking at texts, signs, and photographs in the classroom.

Mathematics:

Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
Shows awareness that money is used to buy things and that coins differ in value.

Busy working on an animal bed...