This week we were able get a deeper understanding of the animals that live in the sea. We studied many different types of sea animals and completed many activities to go along with them.

At the beginning of the week we read a non-fiction book about Whales. We then took the information we learned from the book and made our own whale book. Every student recalled a piece of information from the book and illustrated a picture. They then put the facts into their own words and wrote something to go along with the picture.

Before our Aquarium trip we brainstormed a list of the animals that we thought we might see at the Aquarium. The students shared their ideas and wrote and illustrated work about the animals. On Friday, we went to the Aquarium and the students started their research for their non-fiction writing.

The students also looked at fiction and non-fiction books to learn more about the animals that live there. We first read, Rainbow Fish Discovers the Deep Sea by Marcus Pfister. In this story Rainbow Fish loses his last sparkly scale into the deep sea. This causes him to go on an adventure to go find the scale. His friends warn him not to go because it is dark and they do not know what is down there, but he does not listen and goes anyway. He meets many animals there that look different from anything he has ever seen before. One thing he notices, and we tied into our Science curriculum, is that many of the animals that live in the bottom of the sea have adaptations that help them to live in such a dark place. We then read a non-fiction book named Creatures of the Deep by Katharine Kenah. This book showed us real photographs of some of the animals that are in the sea. We compared these to the animals that were in the Rainbow Fish story.

We continued to work more with punctuation during large group reading. One activity we did included writing out sentences on sentence strips and having the students finish the sentences by writing the correct ending punctuation. Next week we are going to work with nouns during reading.

In Social Studies, we learned about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our Weekly Reader had pictures of him as a child and as an adult. The students learned that he was a man who fought for all people to have equal rights. We also discussed that he was a special man and that he has a day every year dedicated to celebrating his life.

In Math, we used this week as a transition to learn more about reading the clock. We practiced counting by 5’s and discussed why it is important to count by 5’s when telling time. We will return to telling time later in the school year. Next week we will start working with sorting and ordering information. We will use this to start working on collecting information to make graphs.

Have a wonderful three day weekend!