Diamonds in the Rainforest ... and other stuff

We wrote diamond poems today - it was a cross-curricular activity covering a writing objective, a grammar review and Topic work and I love the finished products. The poems were parts of speech:

noun

adjective, adjective

verb, verb, verb

adverb, adverb, adverb, adverb

verb, verb, verb

adjective, adjective

noun

Every poem had to be about a rainforest animal - which is our topic for the term. We've done some research already but it was great to see the girls using their thesaurus to find interesting words and looking up facts in books to check that their words matched the animal.

Some of our finished poems on the white board

I also had a surprise drop-in inspection at a time when there was what I like to call "organized creative chaos". You know, those times when you're in the middle of finishing up a whole pile of projects! We were writing poems, typing poems, finishing books of rainforest facts using place value matching cards, painting rainforest animals and there were children standing on the counter behind the computers stapling their finished paintings to the bulletin board display. I hope it looked like we were a vibrant, engaged class of learners! :) 

Place value cards with matching rainforest animal facts on the other side

I love this jaguar!

Tomorrow we're going to try out another open-ended Maths project since our Aquarium project was such a hit. In fact, my kiddies have asked every day when we're going to do another cool project. They liked the Aquarium one so much that I added it to my Problems with Pets packet (lots of word problems with a Pet Fun Fact theme) and posted it yesterday.

We'll see how the Tortoise Habitat project works tomorrow - I've made it pretty challenging with area as well as addition of money. I'm looking forward to seeing what they all make of it :)