MaST: Seeing Animals Big and Small

How awesome is it that our school is near  a street called Marine View Drive. How even more awesome is it that a local community college has a laboratory and an aquarium a few miles north of us that they open up for school field trips.  

MaST: Marine Science and Technology Center

We started our lesson by asking a good question, "What's in our water?"

We know about the big things, like this gray whale.

But what about the little things, the things that need a microscope in order to see? 

So we became the scientists and went outside to use a plankton tow.

We came back in and looked at our water samples through microscopes.

We looked for both zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants.)

We saw some! 

We even saw one that looked like Sheldon J. Plankton, a SpongeBob SquarePants character.

See the resemblance? 

We then went to the touch tanks that are full of local marine life.

Inside the main building is a mini-museum that houses the skeleton of a whale.

It was found beached in West Seattle.

It's huge--37 feet!

We learned about how some whales have baleen which is used to strain plankton from seawater. An adult gray whale in the summer feeding grounds eats approximately 2,400 pounds of plankton a day!

We examined several types of baleen.

We saw what was in the gray whale's stomach--plastic bags, a surgical glove, a Capri Sun container, duct tape, a sock, a golf ball and more! We wonder if these things contributed to its death. We wonder what can be done to clean up our beautiful Puget Sound.

Thank you, MaST for allowing us to come be scientists. We are becoming more conservation minded and enjoyed our day of investigating the world around us.

Sweet Stuff on Valentine's Day!!

Using candy hearts, we had a 💗LY time learning how to incorporate dialogue into our writing.   

We used this book as an example, showing how to say a lot with just a few words. 

We 💗ED using quotation marks and correct end of sentence punctuation. 

Our stories were quite clever.

We enjoyed sharing the 💗. 

We also did some Love-Bot writing. 

What would you 💗 to have your Love-Bot do for you?

We put a baking soda/red glitter concoction into a 💗shape,

added some vinegar,

and ffffffffsssssssss

BLEEDING HEARTS!

💗 and excitement was in the air as we opened up our VALENTINE gifts and cards

We 💗ed our hot, sweet, homemade poptarts!

What a 💗ly, sweet Valentine's day we had! 

Thank you, room parents, for making it happen and all the parents who helped. 

We couldn't do it without you!

Charley Harper Math Adventure: Integrating Art, Geometry and Science

Sometimes a book sparks an idea. Mrs. Maitlen saw this book and thought, "We could do that!" And so we did.

We looked online at the artwork of Charley Harper and discovered that his "minimal realism" style is almost opposite of John James Audubon's very detailed realistic style that we had studied earlier. 

Mr. Harper once said, "When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don't see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures."

First of all, we decorated the classroom windows with Charley Harper decals. 

"exciting shapes"

"color combinations"

We then played around with different shapes and made our own "interesting pictures."

"patterns"

"textures"

Time to make our own works of art using geometric shapes. "Endless possibilities"

 

 

  

Art is so inspiring.

Geometry is all around us.

The study of animals in science is so interesting. 

Put them all together and voila - exponential learning!