Where would you want to live?

Our town designs are finally complete!  We discovered that there were 12 possible designs for building enough towers to fit 60 families in the new town.  As urban planners, however, we had to take into consideration what every successful community needs to have in order to survive, as well as what features the residents of the town wanted in order to suit their lifestyles.  

With a limit on the amount of space the town could take up, some house designs made more sense than others.  We realized that building 60 single houses would take up almost the entire town and leave no room for nature!  This design was definitely out.  Look at all of the unique town designs we created...

    

Writers Are Observers

To practice adding rich details to our own writing, we've been using our keen observation skills to focus in on specific details. 

Lucas brought in this abandoned bird's nest to share with our class. 

We took some time to carefully inspect the nest, recording specific information that we noticed on our observation sheets.  We used our five senses to help us get as many details as possible.  (Don't worry, we just imagined what it might taste like!)

Once we were finished with our notes, we moved back to our seats to begin writing a descriptive poem about this nest, using the details we recorded.

Then, we shared our poems with a partner.  We gave them feedback by commenting on something we liked about their poem. 

Finally, we chose some lines from our poetry to combine into a class poem.  We were really impressed with some of the poets we have in our classroom!

Maddie said, "Kasia, how do you think of sentences like that?"

 

 

And this is our final draft:

 The Bird's Nest

Feeling wind against my feathers high in the treetop.

It whistles through my ears.

The rough, delicate nest is made out of any materials that I can find.

Bent twigs and sticky mud,

Dried up leaves and soft, squishy moss.

Up so high, it keeps my chicks safe while I hunt for worms and scrumptious, crunchy bugs.

New baby birds, pecking frantically to break free of their eggs.

Rumbling and squeaking, the babies are hungry.

Mama bird shrieks to say, “I’m back!”

It’s not easy for birds to take care of their young.

Even though bird’s nests are fascinating, it’s important to respect them.

Let them be.