We have divided up our ocean and February pages, since they were getting too big to load quickly. If you are looking for the activities we did in the first 2 weeks of our ocean unit click on the shark.

This week we have been venturing into the Sunlight Zone. This is where many different ocean plants and animals live because there is light and food. We made a list of all the creatures that we think may live in this zone of the ocean. This week we have been learning about the coral reef and the wonderful creatures that live there. We read a great Big book by Melvin Berger that has beautiful photographs. One of our questions to the K-Kids was whether coral is a plant or an animal. In the morning, it was pretty evenly divided- 8 thought they were plants and 7 believed that they are animals. By noon, only 2 children thought they were animals. They had had a chance to look at books and to examine the examples of coral we have on the Discovery Table. They were surprised to learn that, indeed, coral is a living animal and the coral reefs are made up of millions and millions of skeletons! We also learned a new "college" word, symbiosis. We looked at the many ways the ocean animals help each other. Some children chose to make buddy wheels which illustrate this concept.

We also wrote our own version of "Down By The Bay", with the children doing their own writing and illustrations. Here are a few examples of the wonderful job they did. We bound all of these pages into a new class book.

Did you ever see a whale with a polka-dotted tail?

Did you ever see a fish make a wish?

Did you ever see a clam eating a ham?

Did you ever see a fly with a bow tie?

Did you ever see a shark eating a park?

Did you ever see a clam saying, "I want Sam."?

We have continued to work on a new paper quilt for our ocean unit. We have now finished both pieces, a Florida blue crab and a beautiful patchwork fish. We have pictures of the blue crab on our first ocean page and will get the fish pictures and hopefully the completed quilt picture up by the end of this week.

We have been busy with many Valentine projects and with both Valentine math and making sets in math. We are working on sets of 3 and made towers of 30, designs using 3 toothpicks, 3 pattern blocks and much more. Our Valentine work jobs entailed graphing how many letters are on a conversation heart, estimating and then counting how many conversation hearts fit in a larger heart and graphing the color of the hearts in a box. These will be finished up by Friday, so we can eat them all up!

We made Valentine bags for our party on Friday and have been working on beautiful decorations and cards.

Some of our entrepreneurs have opened a store that sells valentine hearts, among other goodies.
Some of our Valentine crowns being modeled by our Upper School helpers.

Some pictures from our

Valentine's Day Party

We finished our ocean quilt and it looks great!

One thing that we forgot to add last week was our recipe for Sand Dollar Cookies.

These are very easy- and delicious!

This is the real recipe from Macmillan Early Skills Program- but we modify it-see the end....

Ingredients: 2 c margarine

1 1/2 c white sugar

1 c brown sugar

2 eggs

4 c flour

1/2 c chopped walnuts

1 egg white

cinnamon-sugar mixture (combine 1 t. cinnmaon and 2 T sugar)

Preheat oven to 325

1. Cream the margarine, sugar and brown sugar in a large bowl.

2. Beat the eggs well and mix thouroughly with the brown and white sugar and margarine.

3. Add flour to mixture and shape the dough into a long roll, about 15" long and 2" in diameter.

4. Roll the log in the chopped walnuts. Chill overnight.

5. Cut the roll into 1/4" slices.

6. Beay the egg white and brush on top of each slice. Then sprinkle the cinnamon-sughar mixture over the slices.

7. Bake for 10 minutes. (Makes 5 dozen crunchy sand-dollar cookies)

Modifications- change margarine to soy margarine

Skip the nuts.

We make it the day before, chill it overnight, cut the slices.

Skip the egg white stuff.

On each slice- use a plastic knife to make a star like shape on top- like a real sand dollar- or a very simple x with an extra line.

Then spinkle with the "sand" and cook and eat.

Can you guess why we don't have any pictures?

Our projects for this very short week included the Reef Buddy Wheel and scratch pictures. We changed our sand table to a water table, since we have left the shore and are now in the Sunlight Zone of the Ocean. It was also our 100th day this week. Click here to see those pictures

We are all enjoying the warmer temperatures and all the new fluffy snow. We added a new page of snowy pictures to our photo pages. Click here to see the new snowy days pictures.

We promised to put a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter and Kelp Forest webcams- so here they are- enjoy!

for the live sea otter camera http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_fo/fo_ottr_cam.asp

for the kelp forest camera http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_hp/hp_kelp_cam.asp .

They are doing a special otter days celebration at this California aquarium this weekend (2/22-23/03), so check back to see some of their special activities.

Check back soon for more pictures!