Big Buddies, Animal Art, and an Animal Family Game

This morning we started with big buddies. Our big buddies helped us learn a math game called Race to 100. This game is great practice for tally marks, adding single-digit numbers, and counting by 5's. If you want to play at home you will need two dice or a deck of cards, a piece of paper for recording, and a pencil. Each person takes turns rolling the dice, or picking two cards and adds up the numbers. Then they record that many tally marks on their page. The first person to have 100 in tally marks is the winner.

After that we learned about our new animal art project. Each of us will be making a tear-art version of the animal we have chosen to research. This art project will be really beautiful and will also help us to become experts about our animal's appearance because we have to pay close attention to the details to make a great piece of art. Here are a few examples that Ms. Boyer showed us from her students a few years ago:



Before some of us could begin we needed to keep working on our image search because we still weren't sure what animal we wanted to research.  We will be working on these projects again next week.

After that we had our recess break and then we got ready to go outside to play an animal family game. To start we looked up the sounds that coyotes, chickadees, owls, porcupines, and magpies make. Then we came up with mimicing sounds that we could make to represent each animal. We practiced all the sounds and tried to memorize them.

Then we were each secretly given an animal identity. Once we were outside we spread out in the Whispering Woods and waited for Ms. Boyer to call "Find your family!". When she made that call we all started making our animal sounds and tried to locate the other people in our animal family by listening for their calls. The goal was to find everyone in our family before the game was over. It was really fun and kept us moving and warm in this chilly weather.

When the game was over we came inside and finished up the day with hot chocolate!

Have a great weekend!

Our helper on Monday is: Aksel