We continued to work on the Elephant and Piggie books we started last week.  It's fun to use authors as mentors.  We can learn so much from people who are masters at their craft.  Some of us found it hard to write in only pictures and speech bubbles, but we all found we had to be very deliberate in our word choice and purposeful with our character's emotions and actions.

Springtime is here and we can feel it in the classroom.  We're loving spending time on art projects with our friends.  These are coming home to all you fabulous moms soon!

Today we continued our study of rocks.  We learned how igneous rocks are formed, made observations, and compared them to sedimentary rocks.  Did you know igneous rocks are formed from cooled lava?  Did you know basalt is a type of igneous rock?

Before learning that igneous rocks were just cooled lava, we had a chance to tap into our
creative side and make up a "silly" story to explain their sponge like appearance. 
Maybe they were created when two rocks went biking and crashed into each other. 
​Maybe they were created when kids were blowing bubbles and they stuck together in the dirt.  Maybe some rocks went to the doctor and had to get a lot of shots. Ouch!

We've been talking about Earth Day in everything that we do.  Today we made self portraits on recycled newspaper.  It's fun to think of new ways to do art projects using recycled materials!

We love art projects because they give us time to use our brains in a different way.  
​We also love the time we get to spend chatting with and getting to know our friends better.

Friday we celebrated peace as a school.  We'd spent the week talking about what peace feels like to us and then we got to experience it!  All 547 of us made a pinwheel and made this amazing symbol to show the world what we, Aspen Elementary School, value and care about.

Check out this cool Kid President video too!  He always knows just what to say.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

We also took this opportunity to do a peace building, team building, community building activity with just our class.  We've only got a handful of days left, but we're committed to making our community better all the way to the end.  We took inspiration from the book Leaf and helped get this polar bear back home to the Arctic.  Look at the masterpiece working together creates!

So...Ana asked us how we could make them more rock like.  We came up with some great ideas.  First we thought we should let it sit for a few years and come back to take a look!  We were too hungry to wait.  Then we thought we should add something sticky, like maple syrup or butter.  Then we thought we should stick it in the oven to meld it all together.  Turns out we were right.  When we added butter and sweetened condensed milk the snack stuck together.  Then after a short time in the oven they were the most delicious rocks we've ever tasted.  Thanks Ana!

We're keeping a detailed Rock Observation Notebook so we remember all of these cool facts!

Next up, Igneous and Metamorphic rocks.  Do you think those are tasty too?  We sure hope so!