Earth Day!

During Earth Week we talked a lot about our planet and how we can keep our planet safe. We talked about garbage and recycling (and about the movie Wall e)
One of our favourite books was The Garbage Monster
Don't worry -- it wasn't scary (I always make sure that thy know that things are just pretend in this kind of book).
In it Jo hauls out the household garbage one evening, and the garbage comes alive and threatens her! But Jo plucks him apart limb from limb, and uses recycling to vanquish the beast.

Before we read the book I asked the students what we should do with things that are still useful, but we don't want/need anymore. They came up with great answers! "Give them to people who need them more than us", Give our old toys to children who don't have toys" , "Give them to Honest Earls sale!", "Make something new out of them" "Save them for our own children" (someone actually said "save them for our grandchildren" -- now that's thinking ahead!)

Lets Make Rabbits

We read the book Lets make Rabbits and then we tried our own. In the book there is a pencil rabbit and a scissors rabbit (the pencil rabbit is a drawing and the scissors rabbit is cut out of patterned paper). Here's a sample of a scissors rabbit!The students had to trace and cut out their own shapes to make the rabbits and then place and glue the shapes on a background (I helped some students trace -- they all did their own cutting). I assessed their cutting skills and their ability to make it look like a rabbit -- i.e. getting the body parts close to where they should be (for example, the eye and ears should be on the head, and the tail should be somewhere lower). Some students explained that they were making alien rabbits that weren't going to look like traditional rabbits. That was fine too!