It's a Zoo, Here! Project Based Learning

Last week we blogged about our classroom study of zoo animals in preparation for our upcoming zoo trip and posted some of the awesome work our kids have done so far. This week we continued working with zoo animals and our kids have gone above and beyond our expectations. They created the perfect zoo for animals!  This is the greatest aspect of doing project based learning (PBL’s) with kids. You never know where they are going to take you and THEY ARE TOTALLY FUN! 

We started off with listening to a Voki present the problem/question about zoo animals. For this project we wanted to know:  What does the ideal zoo look like? Before we could answer this question, we needed to get some background knowledge, so we went into our zoo animal web quest to learn about animals that live in a zoo.

The next step was to start group discussions about the conditions in a zoo. The kids worked in groups, with parents helping each group, and came up with ideas that would help create the ideal zoo for the animals.

Here are a few of the pictures of parents helping kids gather their materials for what they came up with: The Ideal Zoo.

These are pictures of kids creating the ideal zoo to solve the problems of the animals.

Using Pixie and Educreations – they put their ideas and thoughts together:

Final pictures of the Ideal Zoo.

simplebooklet.com

I never get tired of seeing their creativity!

With the help of Happy Crayon and ChatterPix they interviewed animals about their new home.

Kindness Book: Jungle Bullies by Steven Kroll 

This is a great book to teach children how to stand-up for themselves and also teaches them not to be bullied. 

iPAD App about zoo animals:  

Pinterest Board:  

PBL product: 

Have a great week!

Plip, Plip Plop!

We have actually seen more sun this spring than we did all of last winter and spring combined! We did have rain this week, thank goodness, since the water cycle was part of our lesson plan for preschool. Parents were amazed at how their four and five year- olds grasped the concept of the water cycle through the hands-on experiments that we did to represent the water cycle.  You have to love the cotton ball as a cloud that sucks up the water and then the rain is represented when you squeeze the cotton ball. J The children loved watching their cups of water too to see if the water would really evaporate.  It is so cool to hear them use the term evaporation when they are talking to each other!

On the other side of the water (not literally), kindergarten was talking about animals that live in the water. Sharks and whales are usually a topic of excitement, but there are lots of interesting animals that live in the ocean and plenty of fun activities that you can do to include a variety of them.  Our kindergarten class did research on an ocean animal and incorporated technology in their research to present what they learned. Awesome!

Web Quest: The unit of study on ocean animals started out with a web quest and listening to Bart the Shark (Voki).  The students were on a quest to find the information about their ocean animal and created their books.  Some were published on Educreations and others on Simplebooklet.

I just made a new Voki. See it here:

Educreations Reports:
Some of the students were allowed to create their animal report on Educreations. Please excuse the pictures that are sideways.  They did an incredible job considering it was the first time they were allowed to be fully independent on their creation!
  

  simplebooklet.com simplebooklet.com
Simplebooklet Reports:

Under the Sea Pixie Slides showing what they learned:

Other activities:

Kindness Book of the Week:

We couldn’t decide between these two books to focus on for our Kindness book of the week because they are both so incredible.  Fish is Fish is a story that’s simply and wonderfully symbolic of how friends can remain friends even when they change as they grow up.  Swimmy is the story of little fish banding together to scare off bully fish.

iPad Apps:

Motion Math: Hungry Fish

Ocean - Animal Adventures for Kids

Pinterest Board:

Freebie:

Product:

Youtube video:

Pictures of the waters in Lipsi (Greece)

Have a great Dolphin Week!