Big blue oceans, seas and rivers are all homes of the amazing animals that Canyon has been exploring. In this unit, our first line of inquiry is “Animals live in different places”. Ocean habitat is our first stop. We created an ocean right in class! We started off discussing how seas and oceans are salty. The best way to understand this is to taste it, and we did! Table salt in water on our palms. How does it taste? Salty!

Each student picked up a sea animal, say its name and dropped it into the ocean! What colour is the ocean? We learned that colours can be mixed to get a different colour. Blue and yellow makes green! Canyon has been building their vocabulary on sea animals with real photographs on the IB wall, videos and popular children books like the Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.

We had a visit from a Junior High school student and he read us a book “The Big Blue Sea”. The visiting student spent the day playing with Canyon and having his meals with us. We encouraged Canyon to eat up all their food then you will grow big and tall like this big brother! We picked some ripe tomatoes from the schoolyard and had them for lunch too. Sweet! Good healthy eating, Canyon!

This week, Canyon students brought some animals to school for Show and Tell. In Canyon, Show and Tell is a casual presentation to the whole class. The student brings something from home and shares 3 things about it. “Good morning Canyon. Today I have Show and Tell. This is a … (name of the object, how it works, what, it looks like, why I like it).” At the end of the sharing, the class asks questions or just make comments. The student ends the session with “Thank you for listening.” The class replies, “Thank you for sharing.” The toy or book is then kept in the backpack to be brought home.

To reinforce letter recognition, we tried making the letters with playdough. We have been practising spelling our names too. To keep cool, our water play continues with fishing and super soakers shooting away! A long weekend awaits us, and coincidentally, it is Marine Day. The class was told that Monday is a holiday because it is Ocean Day, just like what we are learning in school! They were showed a snippet of Our Blue Planet The Prequel. The Youtube video is below. Till next week, enjoy your weekend, go to a beach and have a splashing good time!