Olympic Day 2011

It was a beautiful, sunny (not to mention, hot) day at Cherry Lane for our Olympic Day. Check out all of our athletic prowess in these highlights.

Channel 1-S Tiger News Episode 2

Our reporters worked hard in the field to bring coverage of the woodland animals on Bear Mountain Zoo.

Episode of Channel 1-S Tiger News

Our team of "growing" reporters and botanists are firmly "rooted" in the research process. [insert your groan here].

The class was divided into research teams to find out information on roots, leaves, flowers, and seeds. After reading books and taking notes, each group created a script and props for a newscast. And thus, Channel 1-S Tiger News took seed. Now we present the World Premier of our newscast about the parts of plants.

We are Learning About Engineers

We are learning how to be package engineers with a program developed by the Museum of Science. Our learning begins with the story of Fadil and Bashira who live in Jordan. Their older sister is getting married and is moving to a far away city. They want her to remember them so they decide to give her an Amaryllis from their garden. Fadil and Bashira learn that one cannot simply put a plant in a box and hope it will survive.

Our class will be asked to design a package so that we may send a plant to Montebello school, while keeping in mind the needs of a plant.

We read Pierre the Penguin and made connections to the engineering process. Then we watched the Live Web Cam. You can watch Pierre and his friends now too.

Fun With Poetry

We are currently reading and writing poetry. The new ideas presented in poetry have been very exciting. We noticed that poetry has rhythm. The class was inspired to turn Myra Cohn Livingston's poem Street Song into an actual song with a tune they came up with themselves. Below is a video of our song.

Making Inferences About Animal Teeth

When we were studying dental health, we started learning interesting facts about animal teeth by looking up information in books and on the Internet. I printed some pictures of various animals and asked the class to observe and sort the teeth. After we developed categories, I asked the class to think about why these animals have similar or different teeth. They inferred that carnivores had sharp teeth and herbivores had flat teeth.
I videotaped what happened.

We are Researchers!

Our nonfiction unit is in full-swing and we are learning how to answer our "I wonder" questions by looking up the answers in books and on the computer. We started by learning about dental health and then an "I wonder" question prompted us to look at animal teeth. We read books and sorted pictures of animal teeth. The class noticed that the type of teeth animals have is related to what they eat. Carnvivores have sharp teeth, herbivores have flat teeth, and omnivores have both. We made a tree map to show our findings.

We looked up information about animal diets using World Book Kids and organized it in a chart.

Meanwhile, other students chose topics they were interested in and were writing down what they learned and what they wonder.