Ecosystem Adventures, continued

Our ecosystems are coming along nicely! They are currently broken into 2 parts--a terrarium and aquarium. Our terrariums are continuing to grow, and the grass for most of the groups has grown out of the top! The students are incredibly excited to add the crickets and pillbugs to the terrariums when they arrive, and that should be next Tuesday! I'm interested to see how they react to the bugs; I imagine there will be some squeals. I already know I'm going to need to lay down some ground rules when it comes to the critters, and number 1 will be no tormenting your classmates with the bugs :-)
The students don't know yet that the bugs are coming Tuesday, but I'm going to let them know tomorrow for a little excitement going into the weekend!
The aquariums have been a big hit with the students! One group actually had a very small snail in their aquarium even before we added any animals--I think it hitched a ride on one of the aquatic plants. We added the fish and snails on Monday, and many of them ended up with names very quickly :-) A lot of the students are curious about whether or not they will end up with baby fish and snails.  The fish are pretty small right now and have some growing to do, but they mature pretty quickly, and the other 5th grade teachers have informed me that by the end of the unit there will be a good possibility of some offspring! After adding our animals, we spent a few days learning about how the plants and animals interact with one another and the roles they play in the ecosystem. We also learned about how to tell the difference between the male and female mosquitofish (that's the type of fish we have), and the students want the fish to get out of the fry stage of their life cycle so they can see if offspring are a possibility in their aquariums. We'll see!
Here are a few pictures of our projects:



Mindfulness thought for the week:  Successful people don't do what they want to do, they do what they don't want to do.  --Tom J Deters

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back into the swing of things...

Well, I've been able to spend a little time in my classroom the last few days...but not as much as I would like--we have some construction going on around school, so there is limited access. I usually take this time before I actually HAVE to be back at school (because those inservice days prior to school starting are never enough time). to work on my to-do list and ease back into things. I'm not sure if the general community actually realizes how much time teachers spend at school the few weeks leading up to our contractual time, but I would be willing to bet that at least 75% of elementary teachers are back in their classrooms before inservice starts (I can't speculate on middle and high school). I think I will do a twitter poll to find out...I haven't done one yet, so this seems like a good first attempt. Please visit my twitter poll: https://twitter.com/tomoetjen/status/898270659049959424 Getting the classroom ready for the beginning of the year is a big undertaki...
Read more

Just five more minutes...

I think one of the hardest things about winter break is readjusting to the regular sleep schedule once school starts up again. To be honest, yesterday morning (the first day back) wasn't an issue probably because of adrenaline, but this morning was rough. It was one of those mornings that I wanted to just keep hitting the snooze. It was one of those mornings where I would have rather cuddled up in bed next to my daughter rather than trying to wake her up. But, alas, we had to get over our sleepiness and get on with the day. Today was a day that I have been looking forward to because it was the first day for presentations on semester-long projects for the students. The seventh-grade students were working on Science in the News projects. At the beginning of the year, the students were introduced to Newsela, a website that has a huge library of articles on a variety of topics, including a section on science-related articles. So the students got to peruse the articles that interested ...
Read more

What Day is It?

 Did you ever have one of those weeks where every day kind of bleeds into the next, and by the end of the week you have a hard time remembering what you did on certain days prior? That's how I'm feeling right now. I would say that the main reason for this is that I'm sitting in an empty classroom every day. Even though the students are at home, teachers are allowed to work in their classrooms (assuming that they don't have any illnesses or have been contact-traced). We do have the option to work from home, but I felt that I would get more accomplished at school (fewer distractions :-) Now that the assignments are starting to roll in, it has definitely been helpful to have the quiet time at school to manage grading and identifying what is missing. However, I would much rather have a classroom bustling with activity (as most teachers would). So, even though I couldn't fully remember what happened on what day, looking back at my lesson notes has helped, and it was a pr...
Read more