Turtles

Hello family and friends!

We have had a great week back at school! I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving break spent with family and friends. The kids fell back into routine easily and we've started exploring a new area of study. Before I dive into that, I want to take this time to welcome Zeke to our classroom family! Zeke recently moved here from Chicago and had his first day in our classroom this past Monday. We are excited to welcome him into our class!

To start this week, the kids voted on their new area of study. I wasn't here on Monday but Michelle said it went well. They chose between the subjects of koala bears, turtles, or digestion. Apparently it was a close call between digestion and turtles but turtles won by one vote! As with each of our studies, I never know how to predict a time frame of how long it will take. It seems to consistently be about 2 - 3 weeks. I know it's getting close to Chanukah so we will be taking breaks from our turtle study to talk about the holiday. We're also planning some fun Chanukah activities with Morah Devorah and we are continuing to work on our dance for the play.

The first thing we do when starting a new study is work on our KWL chart. The kids knew a good bit about turtles (which we listed in the K column). They also had a good bit of questions about what they wanted to learn (listed in the W column). We always make sure to leave some extra space in the "W" column because we find that as we learn new things, it also causes us to ask new questions. We were able to find tons of books at the library which are scattered throughout our room now. We spent a good bit of time exploring these turtle books during reading workshop. As I watched the kids in reading workshop this week, I couldn't help but smile. The progress they've made in workshops from the beginning of the year to now is amazing! They did some pair picture walks and everyone was taking turns with the books. They were talking together about the pictures and new ideas they found through these pictures. They were really engaged with one another. Also, the kids actually presented their material to the class this week. They found pictures they wanted to share and talked about something new they learned about turtles from their picture walks. I hope you enjoy the presentation pictures below...I thought they were so sweet! This week, as we presented our findings, I wrote down the new ideas we learned from our books. There is a picture below. What a great list of facts we discovered just from talking about pictures with a peer!

One thing that came up from our reading workshop discussions was the fact that sea turtles bury their eggs. This peaked an interest with the kids. We learned that sea turtles use their back flippers to dig a hole 20 inches deep before laying their eggs and covering them up with sand. We pulled out a measuring tape to show the kids exactly how deep that was. I think we were all impressed that a turtle could dig that deep with just it's back flippers! This lead us to taking our measuring tapes outside to try to dig a hole that deep. The kids used shovels, small rakes, and their hands to dig the holes and then measured them. I think they had a new appreciation for that 20 inch turtle hole before the digging was over! No one could get their hole 20 inches after measuring but they assured me they would keep trying every day until they did it :)

Our hole digging also lead us to talking about sea turtle eggs. We learned that most sea turtle eggs measure to be about 4 cm long. We decided it'd be fun to make our own eggs and measure them. We used white clay (matching the color of real turtle eggs) to make our eggs. We rolled the clay into balls and measured them, then kept adding more clay until we got to 4 cm. We are letting our eggs get hard then we plan on burying them in the sand once we dig that giant 20 inch hole! We also learned that these turtles can lay up to 200 eggs and that they do not come out hard like a normal egg that we think about. They are soft and leathery so when they drop 20 inches they won't break. To show the importance of these eggs being soft and bouncy, we decided to do a little science experiment. We dropped both a hard egg and a soft clay egg from 20 inches to see which one would survive the fall. As all scientist do, we made a hypothesis about each egg before dropping it. After seeing the hard egg crack open, we all agreed that it was important for these eggs to be soft at first so they wouldn't crack before the baby turtle had completely formed inside the egg.

We were also able to borrow some turtle artifacts from other classrooms. We did some exploring of a large turtle shell. We could see the spine from the inside roof of the shell and explored the different holes where the legs and head are attached. We were also able to explore a preserved baby turtle. We were able to examine the top and bottom of it's shell, as well as it's legs, head, and tail. We read that most baby turtles measure to the size of a quarter. We took a quarter and compared it to our baby turtle and found that it was almost a perfect match. I think we've all learned some new facts about turtles this week. We're excited to see where our exploration takes us next week!

Approaches to Learning:

Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment.

Social & Emotional:

Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities, and materials.
Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
Explore books independently.
Begin to ask "how and why" questions when looking at text.
Seek information by looking at texts, signs, and photographs in the classroom.

Mathematics: