Week of March 27-31

Dear families,

I hope you are enjoying the gorgeous weather today! What a change from last week when the kids had to put their snow coats on!

Last week we continued our inquiry about The Ocean. The children learned about starfish and sea horses, made them from paper and wrote about them. We read Eric Carle's book "Mr. Seahorse" and learned about other ocean animals in which the dad takes care of the babies like sea horses do. The children also made clay starfish and positioned them on real shells to dry for their dioramas. They are also making puzzles from their big Ocean colouring page. Because (most) Starfish have five arms, the children played at a "Make Five" Centre, too this week. We watched National Geographic Kids videos about Sea Stars and Sea Horses. With our Reading Buddies we completed a Starfish adjective chart and also started classifying ocean animals into the categories of mollusks, crustaceans, fish, mammals, invertebrates and sea birds. Next week we will learn more about invertebrates (the jellyfish!) and mollusks, which leads nicely into a discussion about living and non-living things (mollusks vs. sea shells). The kids also made as many words as they could with the letters in the word SUBMARINE and STARFISH, and did a word search with ocean words beginning with the letter "S."

Friday was a CRAZY day because it was Crazy Hair Day at LKS, Pizza Day (thank you parent volunteers Elea's mom and Phoebe's mom!) and the Sharing Assembly (congratulations to Ellie, Riley and Sarah who received well-deserved certificates for Honesty!).

A friendly reminder that April's Scholastic orders are due on Monday. The words of the week were WHAT and NEW, like "What's new?"

Thank you so much to Maddie's grandpa who brought in a Conch Shell (wow!), to Ruby who brought tiny seashells, Hudson who shared his Sea Turtle from Chile, and Jackson's Dad who was our Mystery Reader this week!

In Friday's mailbag there was the new April Words and Homework Bingo.

Next week we'll continue our inquiry on the Ocean! Thank you for bringing in clear plastic bottles (with lids!) for our jellyfish activity which we will start this week!

That's the news from Room 166. I hope you have a great week!