Trees!
This week we continued the theme from Salamander Room. We focused on the forest reading two books by Marianne Berkes. Monday and Tuesday we read Over in the Forest: Come on let's take a peek and then Wednesday-Friday we also read Over in the Jungle: A Rainforest Rhyme.
At the beginning of the week we learned about the Temperate deciduous forests that we are very accustomed to seeing here in Pennsylvania. Then mid-week, after introducing the Rainforest, we began to talk about the rainforests as well. Marianne Berkes provides many neat learning and teaching ideas in the back of these books as well a small write-up about the animals in the story. Many of the ideas for this week's school came from the books themselves.
Tree was our word for the week. (We also talked about other words that have ee in the middle of them: week, bees, seed, knee, cheek, etc.)
For math: we counted animals! These two books by Marianne Berkes are counting rhymes to 10. This is all the math that Anastasia needs, but I took things a bit further with Tristan, adding and subtracting the animals and counting raindrops on multiple pages, etc.
For language we acted out the verbs used in each book. 20 action verbs in all. This was fun and allowed me to introduce the idea of what is a verb in a sentence. Our vocabulary consisted of lesser used words from both books like, poults and dabbled. Tristan and I made a simple venn diagram comparing two forest animals. He chose deer and red fox. We also made a chart comparing the rainforest and the temperate deciduous forest with columns for how they are similar and how they are different.
For art we made paper dioramas of the Temperate Deciduous forest, using Jill Dubin's illustrations for inspiration. We painted watercolor forests and we attempted to form play-doh into jungle animals and vegetation. Jeanette Canyon is an amazing artist! Clay work is hard!!
We went out to Nolde forest state park just down the road from us, and what a neat place! The forest there is very thick, quiet, dark and cool. We saw many neat plants that grow only in the cool, shady understory of the forest, like ferns. The mansion house is also so neat! We will be revisiting for nature walks in the future. This little field trip I counted as science. We also read a book about the history of chocolate which gave some scientific detail about both the cacoa plant and also chocolate production. Then we ate chocolate fondue for morning snack. Yum! This book counted as history as well. We were able to talk about Spanish conquistadores, and Milton S. Hershey and everything in-between. Pretty neat that up until 1847 chocolate was only ever a drink! Thanks to the Dutch we now have chocolate in solid form.
For Geography/ Social studies, we added to our markings on our map from last week. In addition to the colored in spots of forest, we circled the portions of forest that are specifically rainforests. Then we noticed something, they are all central on the map, right along the equator! This was a neat exercise and hopefully will stick in the kids memories. Tristan and I read about tribes that live in the rainforests of South America and also about the effects and causes of deforestation.
Here are some of the books we loved this week: I See Animals Hiding, by Jim Arnosky and The Water hole, by Graeme Base.
Can you survive in the Jungle? by Matt Doeden. One of the survival books Tristan picked up last week. We loved the choose your own adventure. And after a few tries, we got out of the jungle safely! Intense!
At the beginning of the week we learned about the Temperate deciduous forests that we are very accustomed to seeing here in Pennsylvania. Then mid-week, after introducing the Rainforest, we began to talk about the rainforests as well. Marianne Berkes provides many neat learning and teaching ideas in the back of these books as well a small write-up about the animals in the story. Many of the ideas for this week's school came from the books themselves.
Tree was our word for the week. (We also talked about other words that have ee in the middle of them: week, bees, seed, knee, cheek, etc.)
For math: we counted animals! These two books by Marianne Berkes are counting rhymes to 10. This is all the math that Anastasia needs, but I took things a bit further with Tristan, adding and subtracting the animals and counting raindrops on multiple pages, etc.
For language we acted out the verbs used in each book. 20 action verbs in all. This was fun and allowed me to introduce the idea of what is a verb in a sentence. Our vocabulary consisted of lesser used words from both books like, poults and dabbled. Tristan and I made a simple venn diagram comparing two forest animals. He chose deer and red fox. We also made a chart comparing the rainforest and the temperate deciduous forest with columns for how they are similar and how they are different.
For art we made paper dioramas of the Temperate Deciduous forest, using Jill Dubin's illustrations for inspiration. We painted watercolor forests and we attempted to form play-doh into jungle animals and vegetation. Jeanette Canyon is an amazing artist! Clay work is hard!!
We went out to Nolde forest state park just down the road from us, and what a neat place! The forest there is very thick, quiet, dark and cool. We saw many neat plants that grow only in the cool, shady understory of the forest, like ferns. The mansion house is also so neat! We will be revisiting for nature walks in the future. This little field trip I counted as science. We also read a book about the history of chocolate which gave some scientific detail about both the cacoa plant and also chocolate production. Then we ate chocolate fondue for morning snack. Yum! This book counted as history as well. We were able to talk about Spanish conquistadores, and Milton S. Hershey and everything in-between. Pretty neat that up until 1847 chocolate was only ever a drink! Thanks to the Dutch we now have chocolate in solid form.
For Geography/ Social studies, we added to our markings on our map from last week. In addition to the colored in spots of forest, we circled the portions of forest that are specifically rainforests. Then we noticed something, they are all central on the map, right along the equator! This was a neat exercise and hopefully will stick in the kids memories. Tristan and I read about tribes that live in the rainforests of South America and also about the effects and causes of deforestation.
Here are some of the books we loved this week: I See Animals Hiding, by Jim Arnosky and The Water hole, by Graeme Base.
Can you survive in the Jungle? by Matt Doeden. One of the survival books Tristan picked up last week. We loved the choose your own adventure. And after a few tries, we got out of the jungle safely! Intense!
beautiful dioramas, all the print-outs from dltk-kids
Camouflage!... except when on the path.
ferns
cold, but enjoying the forest
Highlights High five Magazine idea from a few seasons back
super cute and easy way to paint a forest
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