Nighttime

During our nighttime theme, we focused on objects in the night sky and nocturnal animals.  In reading workshop, we read a book called "The Little White Owl."  In the story, Little White Owl meets some very colorful owls who think he is very plain and boring.  When they get to know Little White Owl, they realize that he is a very "colorful" storyteller and he has lots of colors in his heart.  The colorful owls become very good friends with Little White Owl and they plan to visit him to listen to more of his wonderful stories.

Our classed discussed that the word nocturnal means an animal is awake and active at night and sleeps during the day.  Students made their own colorful paper bag owls.  Here are pictures of our awesome owl puppets!

We combined nocturnal animals and patterns during math.  Students were given a sheet of paper that had owls numbered from 1-15, but they were out of order.  They had to cut out each owl and glue them in numerical order on a branch (brown strip of paper).  

Next, we looked closely at the owls on our branches.  There was a pattern to the owls.  The first owl had glasses, the second and third owls had a hat, and the fourth owl had a bow in its hair.  This pattern repeated. We discovered that the owls were set up in a ABBC pattern.  Students had to color their owls in the ABBC pattern.

During science time, we went outside one morning to find our shadows.  We partnered up and traced each other's shadows.  We went out in the afternoon and noticed that our shadows appeared to be in a different spot.  That's because the sun's position had changed in the sky.

This week, we reached our goal of earning 20 warm fuzzies in our class compliment jar.  To celebrate, on Thursday, we had  a PJ Day!  We wore our comfy pajamas to school!

During recharge time, we watched an online book called "Arthur's First Sleepover."  It was so fun to lay around in pajamas and enjoy a story!

During science, we listed different objects that we might see in the night sky.  When someone mentioned that stars are in the night sky, we started to wonder how far away they are.  It was really interesting listening to all of the students' ideas about how far away they think stars are.  For example, some people thought stars were hundreds of feet away while others thought they might be miles and miles away.  

I asked students if they thought they could catch stars in a jar.  They said, "No, because they are too far to catch."  So we decided to make our own "stars in a jar."  This is a really neat project you can do at home. 

You need a jar (I used a cleaned out peanut butter jar), scissors, glow sticks, and diamond glitter (sometimes called fairy dust glitter).  First, we turned off all the lights and activated the glow sticks and cut them open.  Be careful, they can splatter! Next, we shook the glow sticks and tried to cover as much of the sides of the jar as possible.

  

Then, we sprinkled lots of the diamond glitter in the jar.  Everyone got a chance to shake up the jar. The jar glowed so brightly and the glitter looked like thousands of little stars!  We were amazed!