I sent home a project package for an animal diorama project this evening. The project as a whole is due March 27th.
The dioramas are best made using shoe boxes, so if you have extra boxes lying around, we'd appreciate any extras being sent in. Please let me know if you need a shoe box.
Students have some access to computers at school, but using home time to help build research skills will be useful. We'll continue to fill in our K-W-L charts about the animals we've chosen at school and I have some templates to help format the reports at school in the week after March Break. Getting the research done early will be helpful to let us use class time to write.
In the photo below, you can see that we've begun to talk about the characteristics of different types of animals (vertebrates, mostly) and that the students who were here have chosen an animal to focus their research on.
Unfortunately, several students were away today, so I'll do my best to get the remaining packages out as soon as possible. I'm trying to get each student to pick a different animal and focus on a variety of habitats so we can learn more as a class.
I promised to post some good websites for learning about animals. Here are some of my favourites, but which animals are included may vary:
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/ --Use the sidebar to help search
https://www.pebblego.com/ (free login for tdsb students is on the library sites card that went home in September) --This site will read aloud the text to students
https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/kids --links to pages about specific Canadian animals
http://kids.sandiegozoo.org/animals --Great photos and information, but a little less intuitive to navigate
http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/animals.html --Good for cool facts about your animals, less good as a primary source
https://naturalhistory.si.edu/mna/main.cfm?lang=_en --More advanced set-up, best viewed with an adult, but some interesting maps of habitats and specimen pictures
I'm anticipating that the acrostic and the vocabulary sheet parts of the project will be tricky, so I hope to demonstrate those a little more in depth as students begin to learn about their animals. If you have any questions, please do let me know.
Sincerely,
Lisa Goegan
