Touch Tank

To cap off our amazing week of learning about tide pools and ocean life, we were visited by the wonderful Ellen Gothel of Explore The Ocean World!
Ellen brings in a wide variety of animals found in the North Atlantic including sea stars, lobsters, snow crabs, sea urchins, a living fossil the horseshoe crab, and many other animals. The Touch Tank visit is always fun and hands-on for the kids - the BEST kind of learning! 
There were so many great moments from the visit that we wanted to share, so we made another slideshow! I hope you have fun watching with your student - and maybe they'll share some of the exciting things they learned from Ellen!
Touch Tank Visit by Slidely Slideshow

Sandy Point Field Trip

Mrs. I's class at Sandy Point

This past week we visited Sandy Point to explore tide pools. We have been studying tide pools in the classroom and have even begun to create our own tide pool bulletin board, but we got to explore a REAL tide pool with our guide, Dave. 
The kids had a wonderful time working together under Dave's guidance and were able to find all sorts of sea creatures including crabs, sand dollars, seaweed, periwinkles, and moon snails. We learned a lot from Dave about the different animals and plants we found, what and how they eat, and how each work together to create a tide pool.
Watch our slideshow for all of the pictures from our day at Sandy Point!
  2015 Sandy Point Field Trip by Slidely Slideshow

Tide Pool Fun

This past week, we've been learning about the different sections of a tide pool - splash zone, high tide, medium tide, low tide, and the animals and plants that live in each of the areas. 

We learned a TON about sea stars, too. We not only created sea stars for our tide pool, but we also learned how to use a graphic organizer to help us remember the facts we've learned about sea stars and to write full sentences about them. The students really enjoyed this type of non-fiction writing. I cannot wait to see how their writing develops over the next few weeks as we continue to write about the sea animals that live in tide pools. 

Here is a sample of writing and the beginnings of our classroom tide pool. The next few weeks will be exciting and fun to say the least - I cannot wait to keep sharing your student's wonderful work!

We've been reading non-fiction books on sea stars this week. The students have learned about lots of genres of literature this year, including this very special genre of expository non-fiction that has a main topic (sea stars) and details about the main topic (they have 5 or more rays, they can be many different colors, they don't have blood!).

This student wrote about the sea star's stomach and how it comes out of the mouth, that it can stick to rocks, and that their arms are called rays.

The beginnings of our tide pool with our sea stars, mussels, and barnacles!

The best part of our tide pool bulletin board is that we made it 3-D! Thank you to all of the families for sending in recyclable materials.