Maggie chose to practice her spelling words using natural objects. What a fun way to combine learning with time outside!

First grade ichthyologists observed fish in conjunction with their living and nonliving unit. Click here to watch fish.

All living things (plants and animals):

• Move on their own
• Reproduce (make more of their own kind)
• Need air, food (energy), and water
• Grow and change (life cycle)
• React to changes around them (light, heat, sound)

After a lesson about fish body parts, life cycles, and habitats, each of us had a goldfish to observe up close. Is the fish alive? How do you know? This can be a confusing unit. Children often think water, cell phones, fire, and clouds are living. Is a stick or an apple living? Yes, they are classified as once living.

The ability to meaningfully interpret text features in non-fiction books is an important skill. As we observed our fish, we drew a diagram and added the labels.

When I was cleaning up, I discovered that one of my biologists had drawn a heart on the paper under her fish. I love living things too!

During online learning, third and fourth graders had the homework option to make oobleck. Is it a liquid or a solid? You decide! Want to learn more? Click here and here. Do not put oobleck down your sink!

PreK scientists are studying the forest, so our lab focused on trees. After learning the parts of a tree (trunk, branch, twig, and leaves), we looked at a collection of sticks and noted the diversity. Some were long and thin, while others were short and thick. Some of the sticks were covered with lichen and others were curved or branched. We used cards to sort them.

The book fair has a superhero theme this year, so every classroom door is covered with superheroes. Aftercare students decorated the science lab door with superhero pollinators.

I have a prism taped to my window and we have fun watching to see where the rainbow (visible spectrum) appears in my room! Mrs. Baughman has a bad case of the stripes!

Third grade biologists dissected sterilized barn owl pellets as part of their unit on vertebrates. Owls eat their prey whole. Since birds don’t have teeth, they can’t chew their food. The owl slowly digests its meal by separating the softer materials, such as meat, from the harder materials, such as bones. It then regurgitates the bones along with indigestible items, like feathers and fur, in a pellet.

We used a bone identification key to identify the bones we found. Animal skeletons found in the pellets included mice, rats, shrew, voles, moles, and birds. We discovered that the animal bones have the same names as those in our bodies, such as femur, scapula, clavicle, rib, skull, and mandible.

Click here to learn how to dissect a pellet.
Click here to learn more about owl pellets.

In their homeroom classes this week, third graders were asked to revise a sentence about an owl pellet. Vocabulary development is an essential component of reading comprehension.

Fourth graders read Poppy by acclaimed Newbery-winning author Avi. The story is an animal adventure about an owl who rules Dimwood Forest. Children understand passages like the one following because they dissect owl pellets in third grade.

“…she glanced at the base of Mr. Ocax’s tree. There lay what appeared to be a mound of pebbles. Gradually a ghastly realization came over her. What she was seeing was a mound of Mr. Ocax’s upchucked pellets, the closely packed and undigested bits of fur and bone from his dinners. The vision made her blood turn cold.”