We have a couple of exciting projects happening that we want to share with you!
Environmental Exchange Box
Earlier this school year, I attended a workshop for Project Learning Tree (PLT). The resources I gathered throughout that day gave me some fantastic ideas to incorporate the environment into our daily learning. One activity I was particularly excited about gave students a tangible way to experience a new environment and continue to develop awareness of our own environment. Through the environmental exchange box, PLT gets us connected with another school that resides in a very different area. For us, that school is in Atlanta, Georgia!
Here’s the plan: Students brainstorm ways we can communicate what our environment is like by collecting items to place inside a box. We have already worked together to write a class poem about Lake Leopold. The class worked together to consider how we can represent our environment through different forms of communication. This is what we came up with to add to our box:
After creating, gathering, and writing, we will send off our environment box to Georgia! Meanwhile, students in Georgia are doing the same activity. When they receive our box, hopefully they will be able to imagine what the PCCS campus is like! We will receive their box from Atlanta to help us understand the similarities and differences between our two environments. Students will explore and discover Georgia’s surroundings through this exchange. We can’t wait! We will keep you updated as we complete this exciting project!
Sunrise and Sunset
To prepare us for our upcoming science unit, students are beginning to track the time of sunrise, time of sunset, and length of each day. We will be looking for patterns here as we transition out of our light and sound unit (ending this week).
Paper Tracking
Students are working on using less paper as a class. We kept track of one week’s worth of paper usage and found that we used 376 sheets of paper in five days (that’s about 16,500 sheets in one school year)! Students passed around a stack of 376 sheets of paper to feel the weight of it, but then came up with ways to use less in the following week. We created reminders by our paper station and recycling bin to help us with this goal. Students decided to use scrap paper for these reminders, so right from the beginning we were reusing materials! Wish us luck on this challenge. Look for a post at the end of the week to see how we did. 🙂
Mrs. Buesking