A Break from Routine

This last week was really strange in the classroom regarding the regular routine and schedule.  Monday and Tuesday were fairly normal, but then I was out of the classroom for Wednesday and Thursday to visit schools in Laguna Beach for some inspiration on classroom spaces that will be taken back to our own district's technology committee.  Friday was not normal at all since we went on a field trip in the morning to the high school's Ag Barn and Greenhouse.  Despite all of the abnormalities in the week, we had a great week in class and lots of things to share.

One of the big focuses for this last week was adverbs.  The students learned that these are very similar to adjectives (which we studied earlier in the year), but that adverbs describe the action or verb instead of the noun.  We began by making a list of different types of words that would qualify as adverbs.  It was decided to separate the words into categories of "how," "when," and "where."  With this we used the basic verb of jump to see if our words really did work as adverbs.  We also took sentences that were really simple and added in some of the adverbs to make them "3rd grade sentences."  (Now is the time of year to really push the 3rd grade emphasis... and it keeps the students motivated as we near the end of the school year.)
The example on the board for our simple sentence was "He is sleeping."  Then we changed that sentence to be a "really good 3rd grade sentence" and wrote "He is sleeping quietly inside today."  We discussed how the more a sentence goes into details, then the reader can relate to the story more.

The next piece of this activity was to have each student write an adverb on the "verb" posters to describe how, when, or where the events were happening.  Our verb choices were "WRITE," "RUN," "EAT," and "SLEEP."  We got quite a variety of adverbs added to our posters with simple verbs on them.

On Friday we had our trip to the high school Ag Barn and Greenhouse.  The students rotated throughout 5 different groups and were able to participate in many agriculturally related events.  At one of the rotations the students saw animals, such as baby turkeys, pigs, and chickens.  Students also planted green bean seeds and transplanted either sage or flowers.  The students also cut branches of rosemary and put them in a separate area as new starts.  The students also had a chance to go on a hayride.  It was definitely a fun day and it tied in so well with our Life Science curriculum in 2nd grade with plants, animals, and habitats.

The students really enjoyed playing in the soil.

Being introduced to the barn and Ag area.

The KHS greenhouses

Walking the chickens out of their pens.

Baby turkeys

baby pigs

 

 Holding Baby Turkeys

Petting the baby pigs

 Seeing the horse and cow 

Planting seeds

 Transplanting sage and flowers

 Replanting rosemary as new starts

The hayride

 Visiting the KHS newly planted vineyard

 watching the tractor weed in the vineyard

 doing the weeding ourselves in the vineyard

Hard workers...

KHS vineyard

What a great way to end the week!  After walking all over that morning, it was a pretty quiet afternoon in the classroom.  While we don't have a field trip this next week, we do have 2 assemblies in the afternoons.

*As a reminder, the ocean field trip is right around the corner on Friday, May 19th.  If you have not sent your child in with $10 already, please do that soon so that we can pay for the bus to get us to Fort Bragg and back.  Also, if you are a parent who is planning on going and you don't have everything cleared through the District Office, please get that taken care of in the next week.