We are full-force into our bird research! The students have spent this week working very hard on using a variety of sources to gather information about their Ohio bird of choice. The students are investigating the following topics about their birds: description, habitat, diet, nesting & interesting facts. Today we finished up using field guides, non-fiction books and the internet to collect facts. The next step in this process will be taking the facts that we have gathered and writing paragraphs that will be used to create a class field guide.
The students are becoming quite the experts on Ohio birds. A visit from Mrs. Van was a great way to get the children excited about becoming "birders". Mrs. Van taught us several facts about birds that are native to Ohio. She even brought along different birds for us to see up close and personal!
Tomorrow, we will be out in the field gathering research as we practice our bird watching skills. Today we discussed what we will be doing tomorrow on our visit to the Audubon Center and even practiced using quiet voices and listening as we heard the call of all 21 birds that we are researching.
Not only are we using our research skills to learn about our birds, but we have been busy working on other things in our classroom. For the last 2 weeks, the students worked on creating their own "bird stories". We all worked through the writing process together, breaking it up into small parts so the task did not feel so overwhelming.
- First, we created story sketches and story maps that included the beginning, middle and end of the story.
- Next, we used our story maps to write a more detailed beginning, middle and end.
- Once the stories were completed, we revised the stories to make them stronger.
- Then we edited for spelling, capital letters and punctuation.
- The final step in this process will be publishing. The children decided on taking their stories and creating a class book that includes each of their finished pieces.
For the last few weeks, we had 2 chrysalises inside of our classroom that were waiting to transform into Painted Lady Butterflies. Last Friday, we noticed that one of the chrysalises was now a beautiful butterfly. On Monday, we came to school to find that the other chrysalis had also transformed. Yesterday afternoon, we went out to the garden to set the 2 butterflies free. We discussed that it was important to let the butterflies go outside, since our classroom is not the right habitat for these butterflies. It was a great ending to the day to watch the 2 (plus Will's butterfly from home!) Painted Ladies fly freely into the sky!
I am looking forward to next week! We will be working on creating our field guides, choosing writing pieces for our portfolios and publishing the bird stories. We will end the week with our long-awaited field trip to the zoo!