Merry Christmas!

This is our classroom tree. Notice the winter theme? The glue guns and paint brushes have been busy this month as we have made wooden sleds, snowboarders out of pine cones, glue snowmen, yarn stocking hats, beaded snowflakes, and golf ball snowmen. These are going home as gifts for family members.

Happy holidays from my class!

A Real Minnesota Winter

This is how the kids in our elementary school have been spending P.E. class this week. Good old fashioned sliding down a hill at breakneck speeds, wind in their hair, snow in their faces.

We have P.E. right away in the morning, so on this particular snowy day the kids came in covered with snow from head to toe. They then proceeded to take all their gear off and stuff it into their lockers. Two hours later it was recess time and guess who had to put on wet snowpants, wet gloves and wet boots? Yup, my kids. They didn't seem to mind and had a great time outside at recess too.

Of course, two hours later they put their now soaking outside gear back on to go home. I hope it got dried out during the night.

Angiosperm Buffet

The second group of plants we are studying are the angiosperms - plants with flowers and fruits. Today each fifth grader was given a different fruit to cut open and explore the seeds inside. We had a kiwi, watermelon, cantaloupe, pomegranate, pear, star fruit, mango, persimmon, apple, pineapple, orange, cucumber, lemon, tomato, green pepper, Asian pear, lime, grapefruit and avocado.

It's always fun to get into the fruit verses vegetable debate, and it takes some convincing to get fifth graders to believe tomatoes, cucumbers, and green peppers are really fruits. They now know that a fruit is a fleshy covering for seeds. If it has seeds, it's a fruit!

After our dissection, I cut up all the fruits for the kids to eat. Many of them tried something new today.

What's a Gymnosperm?

The fifth graders have been studying plants in science. We are starting with the gymnosperms - plants that don't have fruits or flowers. A conifer would fall in this category, so I brought in the eight native conifers to northern Minnesota. The kids had to identify them with field guides.

Usually this is a difficult task for fifth graders because they call every tree with needles a "pine" tree. (Growing up in northwestern Minnesota, we called every evergreen a "spruce" tree.) When I tell them there actually are only three real kinds of pine trees where we live, they get a little confused.

I was pretty impressed with my class this year. They knew a jackpine from a balsam fir and even figured out the difference between a black spruce and a white spruce (neither one is black or white). I've got quite a bunch of budding little naturalists!

Native Art

We have been studying different cultural regions of Native Americans in history class. After learning about the Northwest Coast Indians we created two fabulous totem poles that have been keeping watch outside our classroom.

The Southwest Indians used kachinas to teach their children about important spirits and so we created our own kachina dolls. I love how the students all started with a toilet paper tube and a wadded up piece of paper, but with a little paper mache and paint, each kachina doll is a unique creation.

Our art budget was cut last year and so the classroom teachers are teaching art this year. One of the Minnesota art standards involves learning about multicultural art and there also is a social studies standard on learning about Native American groups. I guess this is my way of "killing two birds with one stone," so to speak.