A Slimy Haiku Mystery...Can you guess who?

Last week we read If Not for the Cat - a book of haiku by Jack Prelutsky.  We quickly found out, though, this wasn't just any ordinary book of haiku.  Each page held a mystery.  On each page, Prelutsky wrote a haiku to describe a mystery animal.  He used sensory details to give the reader clues about what animal he was describing.  We decided to try our hand at writing a haiku poem.  Where did we head for inspiration?  The Stony Point Nature Trail, of course!

We quickly found our inspiration right beside Post 2 on the trail.  Read our mystery haiku poems below and try to guess what animal from the nature trail we might be describing...

Luke's haiku, inspired by our mystery discovery...

Kaitlyn's haiku about our mystery creature...any ideas!?

Sofie's haiku, with her sketch as a hint...any guesses?

The creature we found on the nature trail to inspire our haiku was...

Can you see me hiding around the orange dot?  My camouflage is quite helpful.  I'm a....SLUG!

Try out a haiku of your own!

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.

Inspiration from Artifacts

On Wednesday we got to explore a suitcase full of artifacts from different decades throughout history - from a pelt the Powhatan may have owned all the way to an upright telephone from the early 1900s. We were in awe just looking at all of the artifacts! Could any of them be an inspiration for writing? One item in particular caught everyone's attention. A small wind-up toy made out of tin had us all laughing, once we finally got him to work! We think he's a toy from a while back, but we want to do some research on how old he is exactly. After writing down all the details we could observe about the duck, we wrote a poem together. You can read the poem we wrote about him below...

Wind-Up Duck

He's a wind-up duck, just wind him up.

Just let him go and he'll do a show.

He'll twirl his hat just like that.

He rides around on the ground.

He has wide staring eyes,

all dressed up in his suit and tie.

He's a clockwork duck but he doesn't go cluck.

His gears go 'round, you can't miss the sound!

Riding into town, 

he sees the king and bows down.

Decisions, Decisions

For the past two weeks, we've been working on a math building challenge that required us to become town planners. A new town needed to be built that would house 60 families total. Using multi-link cubes (one cube representing one family's house) we had to find all of the possible ways these families' houses could be built - 60 single houses, 30 towers of 2 houses each, one really tall tower of 60 houses, and other possibilities. After we found all of the possible designs, we had to make some decisions.

Which design would be the best house design for the new town? You can see how we each tested and tried out the different designs on the town map before we made our decisions.

Here are some of the questions in our brains that influenced each of our decisions...

• Which design is the most environmentally-friendly?
• Which design allows for the most open space?
• What do the people who will live in the town need from their community?
• What makes a successful community or town?

After making a final decision on the house design, we each started planning what types of businesses, stores, and other attractions we'd include in our town. Check back soon to see the final town plans!

Sofie decides on 6 towers of 10 houses each

Desiree plans where her towers will be built

Austin focuses on sketching his town design

Maps with Manipulatives

We made birds-eye view maps with math materials we found in our classroom. We found out that using lots of different materials - unifix cubes, 3-D building blocks, hundred blocks, and pattern blocks - helps build 3-dimensional maps. The final products took two days of building. One of our toughest challenges was actually making our maps look like our real classroom. Some groups had to totally rethink and rebuild more than once. (The picture of the map you see at the top is from a group who completely changed their map from the first day to the second day and ended up with a better map than they started with.) We had a lot of fun building the maps, but we put so much work into it that it was hard to take them down.

Our whole team had to agree on the features of the map and sometimes it was hard to make a decision that 3 or 4 people agreed with. Look below to see some of the special details groups included in their maps:

Our class windows built with clear rectangles

Our "Dr. Suess" door with our clock hanging overtop!

One group even included themselves working at the round table

Got a heavy load? No problem!

Last week we became Simple Machine experts. After some investigating in the simple machine books we had in our classroom, we created experiments to show how each simple machine works.

Henry and Rhyane demonstrated different kinds of wedges they found around our classroom - scissors, a shovel, a spoon and fork. The most surprising wedge they discovered was their TEETH!

Sam, Macy, and Mallory built a lever with a ruler as the flat plane and a wooden cube as the fulcrum. They showed us how moving the location of the fulcrum makes the load easier or harder to lift. The closer the fulcrum is to the load, the easier the load is to lift.

Ginger, Kristina, and Jamaine built a pulley. Below they're teaching us that the pulley actually changes the direction of the force because to move the load up you pull down. They realized that an elevator is like a pulley because it moves the load up.

After teaching each other about our machines (and getting plenty of volunteers to help with our experiments!) we set out on a search. You might not believe it, but there are simple machines hiding all over the hallways of Stony Point. Here are a few that we found. See if you can guess which simple machines they are!