Lewis and Clark Learns

I am SO thankful to work with these amazing gals.  Together we wrote a grant that was funded by our school district foundation.  We will be sharing robotics materials between 3 schools.  That way, the materials are in use all year round...including the summer months.  Soon we will be getting together to develop a scaffolded curriculum and a schedule that will work for all of us.   I am so appreciative to the LSDF for the opportunity to bring so many amazing experiences to my students.

My kindergarten kids have started a research project about ANTS. We are learning so much. We are learning from books, encyclopedias, and visual and online sources. The KidPix illustrations you see below show us using what we have learned... Ants have three body parts, six legs, two eyes, can be brown, black, red, or even yellow, they live and work in colonies, the queen bee has wings, and so much more. We are so excited to be learning!

Our fabulous first graders have been working on a research project to learn about ladybugs. We have worked collaboratively and are now moving into some independent learning. We started learning using books and encyclopedia resources and will soon to move to online sources. Check out the kids in action...

Kindergarten Research Project After several weeks of reading, learning, researching, and thinking, my kindergarten kiddos have finished their Hippo and Turtle nonfiction books. We used the stories of Owen and Mzee to guide us in our questioning and used other nonfiction books to answer the questions we had about hippos and turtles. I then put our information together into a book for the kids to add illustrations. Joseph's finished product is below...

Each year fifth graders at LC attend "Boot Camp" in the library for intense training on how to access information in our library. We exercise our minds and bodies!

Fourth graders at Lewis and Clark S pend M inutes I n L iterary E njoyment! Each month a different genre focus helps us learn literary techniques or a writing craft. The month of March finds my fourth graders immersing themselves in magazines to work on writing a quality summary. Students often find one magazine they love and check out the same magazine title over and over. One of our goals with this genre is to expose the kids to new magazines they have never even looked at such as Dig, Ask, KidZone, New Moon, Click, Cousteau Kids and so many others. It was amazing to watch them delve into the magazines and find out what they have been missing. When we talked about magazines in depth, they realized they found magazines where students can publish their own stories, poetry, and pictures. They also realized that some magazines are all about one topic while others have a variety of topics. They really seemed to be drawn to those magazines that stay on topic. The summary writing came very ...