Life Cycles

This month we began our study of  life cycles. We have three essential questions guiding our learning during this unit:

• What characteristics do all living things have in common?
• How do organisms grow and change throughout their life cycles?
• What structures allow organisms to survive and thrive in their environment?

Students have had the opportunity to observe and illustrate a variety of plants and animals.

Students are observing plants in various stages of their life cycles.

 Students observed Jimmy the gecko and enjoyed watching him gobble up crickets and warm up by laying on his favorite rock.

 Students created germination bags to view our pea seeds in the first few days of planting.  This gives us a chance to see what is happening beneath the soil.

Students planted pea seeds so that they can observe a pea plant life cycle up close.

We learned that all living things...

grow and change

breathe

eat/drink to get their energy

move

reproduce

die

  Some students do not believe that plants move on their own, so we have designed an experiment to see if we can gather evidence to prove of disprove this.

Students went on an observation walk to gather and classify living, non-living, and dead things they found along the way.

This week students are designing creative amphibians.  These animals must have features to allow them to survive both in water and on land.  They are using what they know about real animals to decide how their creative animal will eat, protect itself, and move on land and water.

Book Lunch Bunch

We held our first Book Lunch Bunch on October 2, 2015! All students who read our Picture Book of the Month, What in the Wild? were in attendance.  We ate lunch together, discussed the book, and read it together for a second time.  Our group was small, but I hope it will grow in numbers next month. 

Our picture book for the month of October 
is by one of my favorite authors, Patricia Polacco.  It is called Thank You, Mr. Falker.