Saturday, May 24, 2014

Remember Our Fallen


Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day. On this day people remember the military personnel who have died serving our country. It began as Decoration Day because many people decorated the graves of the fallen brave soldiers. Many Americans in Germany visit the WWII grave sites, which include numerous Americans, in Germany as well as in the surrounding countries. We are so thankful for these men and women whose bravery and sacrifice help to keep our country’s freedom. So please take a moment this weekend to honor our fallen soldiers.


 Our children participated in many activities in class and are planning to visit cemeteries in Luxembourg this weekend. 

We decided to ask Lady Liberty -who symbolizes freedom- about ideas on celebrating Memorial Day.  Watch and enjoy!













Pixie Slides on Educreations




Other activities to honor our soldiers: Accordion books and riddles






We restudied the meaning of the Pledge:



Pictures of Normandy from the N Family’s visit (Thank you!)








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Kindness Book :   The Wall by Eve  Bunting                       


This is the second Eve Bunting book I’ve chosen this year to share.  What an incredible author!   In The Wall she’s done an outstanding job of capturing the meaning of Memorial Day.  




Normandy Today:

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Saturday, May 17, 2014

It's a Zoo, Here! Project Based Learning




Last week we blogged about our classroom study of zoo animals in preparation for our upcoming zoo trip and posted some of the awesome work our kids have done so far. This week we continued working with zoo animals and our kids have gone above and beyond our expectations. They created the perfect zoo for animals!  This is the greatest aspect of doing project based learning (PBL’s) with kids. You never know where they are going to take you and THEY ARE TOTALLY FUN! 

We started off with listening to a Voki present the problem/question about zoo animals. For this project we wanted to know:  What does the ideal zoo look like? Before we could answer this question, we needed to get some background knowledge, so we went into our zoo animal web quest to learn about animals that live in a zoo.



The next step was to start group discussions about the conditions in a zoo. The kids worked in groups, with parents helping each group, and came up with ideas that would help create the ideal zoo for the animals.
Here are a few of the pictures of parents helping kids gather their materials for what they came up with: The Ideal Zoo.






These are pictures of kids creating the ideal zoo to solve the problems of the animals.






Using Pixie and Educreations – they put their ideas and thoughts together:



Final pictures of the Ideal Zoo.
simplebooklet.com


I never get tired of seeing their creativity!












With the help of Happy Crayon and ChatterPix they interviewed animals about their new home.







Kindness Book: Jungle Bullies by Steven Kroll 

This is a great book to teach children how to stand-up for themselves and also teaches them not to be bullied. 


iPAD App about zoo animals:  





PBL product: 




Have a great week!





Sunday, May 11, 2014

Lions, Tigers and Bears, Oh My!



We are going to the zoo! What an enriching experience this is for children!  Zoos are one of the best ways to make classroom connections to the real world and our classrooms are already abuzz with activities and research about animals that live in the zoo.  The zoo we will be visiting is in our local area and has a limited number of animals, so we have narrowed the research to those animals that we will actually see in the zoo, but what fun we are having. We’ll get to learn the names of the animals in German too! Here are some of the activities that went on this week starting with a web quest.  Because there is so much to share, the zoo PBL (project based learning) project will be posted next week.

The children paired off in groups and researched animals, wrote a report, and created the animal. In addition to their web quest animal project, they had fun solving animal riddles, creating Chatter pix of their animal and were introduced to a new app called Thinglink.


 Research:  



Animal Riddles:  
simplebooklet.com
ChatterKids: 



 





A fun iPad App - Thinglink &

Art Activities:                  





Kindness Book of the Week: A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Phillip C Stead.
This is a beautiful story about friendship.  Amos McGee is a friend to all and his friends come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and species.  He spends time with each of his friends and when he become sick, his friends return the favor and come to see him and help him.  Now that’s the meaning of true friendship!     


More ChatterPix Kids: 

   



















San Diego Zoo