Walk With Pride

Lots of Forest Grove teachers were up early and on the jogging trail this morning with their dogs.  It was the annual fundraiser, Walk With Pride.  Max and Gabrielle from our class were there early, too. It was a fun morning, especially for Garmin!

Thank you Mac and Dave for sharing your birds

In Science, we have been studying adaptations of plants and animals that live on land for the last several weeks.  We have focused on animals from many different biomes and students have been doing research on desert animals for our zoo design project.  It has been interesting, but today we had visitors who really showed us what adaptations are all about.

Mac and David Lindenthal-Cox are local falconers (Mac is a former Forest Grove Falcon). They brought two beautiful birds to share with us today.  First, we met their American Kestrel.  I think everyone was surprised by how small this beautiful little bird was.  Students were very interested to learn that she can eat prey that weighs more than she does.  We learned that one of the reasons she can do that is because she has a special little growth on her beak.  We also saw that she has markings on the back of her head that look like eyes.  These are to scare off predators who might want to eat her.

This American Kestrel is less than a year old.  They know she is a female because she is mostly brown; the males have a lot more blue on them.  The Lindenthal-Cox's are helping to teach her how to hunt so that she has a greater chance of surviving in the wild.  She will be released after a relatively short time.

Next, they showed us a Harris's Hawk.  The class stayed very quiet while this much larger bird got used to the classroom environment.  They even stayed pretty quiet when she opened her wings, which was difficult because students were surprised by her wingspan.  One of the other things students commented on were her imposing looking talons.  They look very strong and sharp.  The Lindenthal-Cox's have had this bird for two years and it will not be released into the wild because it has always been around people.

Mrs. Newman even got to hold the Harris's Hawk. She is a lot lighter than she looks, only about 2 pounds.

It was a very interesting afternoon.  We want to say a big thank you to the Lindenthal-Cox's.  There is nothing better than having experts share their knowledge with the class.

International Dot Day

We celebrated International Dot Day on Monday.  In case you are not familiar with Dot Day, it was started several years ago by educators who wanted to celebrate Peter Reynold's wonderful book, The Dot. In this book, a reluctant student is encouraged to "make her mark" on the world.

We spent our Dot Day talking about how we might make our marks on the world.

1.  We could make our mark by contributing our ideas in group discussions.

We started the day by reading The Dot. You can watch The Dot here if you're interested.

We also watched a video about Peter Reynolds.

Then, we practiced speaking and listening skills while we answered some discussion questions.  We worked on supporting our answers by referring to the text and using sentence starters like: "On page ___, it said", "The author wrote _____________", "An example is _______________", "I know because _________________", "In the book, it said _______________", and "One thing I noticed was that _______________________".

We also practiced being good listeners.  Only the person holding the "discussion dot" could be talking.

2.  We could make our mark by collaborating with people from other places.

We are very excited to have a buddy class in Atlanta, Georgia.  They celebrated Dot Day early and we know they wrote Dot Day postcards to us, so we painted watercolor dot postcards for them and added some short notes on the back.

3.  We could make our mark in the world by discovering something new in science or engineering.

We used Dot candy to conduct an experiment about the strength of buildings made with different geometric shapes.  We built cubes, 3-sided prisms and 4-sided prisms.  Each student made a hypothesis about which shape would be the strongest, then we tested our hypotheses.  Afterwards, we practiced making geodesic domes, like the one on the Middle School playground and bridges using squares and rectangles.  Here is a link to a project much like ours.

4.  We could make our mark as artists.

We learned about Vassily Kandinsky.  He was an abstract artist who believed art could be created with just colors, lines and shapes.  He believed different colors and shapes could show different emotions.  He also painted lots of pictures with dots!  One of his most famous paintings was one filled with concentric circles.  You can see a photo of it here.

We made our own Kandinsky-style art.

We thought our Dot Day activities were over at the end of the day, but then our buddy teacher in Georgia let us know about a very fun augmented reality  app, colAR Mix, that we could use to make our dots come to life.  So, we celebrated a little bit more.  Look how much fun everyone had seeing their dots turn into spheres.