Moonjelly Fun!

These flaps reveal some pictures of this week's vocabulary words

It's fun to see what the kids will choose when they have a choice before them. The task was to arrange three pictures of vocabulary words on a page with definitions. R7 chose to use the pictures themselves as the flap with the word on it. She narrated each definition to me and wanted it to be put under each picture.

They had three vocabulary words and I-5 chose to do the flap book. On the inside of each flap is the defintion of each word and thanks to google images I found some very cool pictures to match! He was very succinct and totally accurate for each meaning.

I-5's ocean invertebrate page

I-5 decorated his menu so nicely and even added some moonjellies. Can you see them? This was at our waterfront dinner on the first day of school last week.

R7's pages on ocean invertebrates

I-5's list of foods he could remember from the book

I-5's ocean invertebrate sorting page

This is R7's lesson on sorting ocean invertebrates on the left. I used an activity from Evan Moor's teacher filebox. The kids sorted out animals into echinoderms, mollusks, arthropods, and cnidarians (which jellyfish belong to). On the right is the list of food she could remember from the book.

I-5 dictated his first person point of view paragraph to me. He is in Kindergarten of course and is still working on letter formation. However, he sure can tell a tale and narrating to me is a valuable skill. It lets him give details he would normally avoid in his written word at this point. He narrated very well the experience we had visiting the marina at the end of the first day of school.

R7 decided to combine two language arts lessons into one. I had even given her the choice writing a paragraph in first person point of view or writing one that made use of contrast. She chose to do both. She declared, "I will do both- a first person paragraph using contrast. Good for her! She began with just a few sentences and was worried she didn't have enough, but we had an excellent lesson on adding detail and editing until she arrived at the final product. You can click any of these pictures to see her stories close up. Way to R!

Not to be out done, R7 makes two pattern block lobsters (see her brother's below). Her twist was to make two- one that was big enough to keep and one that needed to be thrown back. She even had the ruler to be sure.

I-5 really loves the new pattern blocks we bought for school this year. Today he had some free time in the afternoon to match the pattern cards and then made this free form "lobster" shape.