New Voki

We created a new Voki for our blog today. As a class, we needed to decide which character to choose. We decided to be democratic about it, which means we had a vote! We used our new flashcard whiteboards and each wrote the name of the animal character we preferred. We placed our whiteboards on the floor in columns to make a graph. We could tell which character won without even needing to count them, because we could see that the "beaver" column was longer than the others. You can listen to our new Voki. It's on the right side of the page.

We work so quietly during Daily 5 time! Mrs G took a video of us. This is how we work every single day during Literacy. It makes it so much easier to concentrate on our reading, or our work and it lets Mrs G work with individuals or small groups of students.

In Science, we're learning about living things. We know that there are 7 characteristics that ALL living things have. Sometimes, it's hard to see how the living thing does each of these, but they do them all! The 7 characteristics of living things are:

• Respiration (or breathing) - Animals breathe with their lungs, but we can't see plants breathe. They do it through their leaves.
• Feeding - All living things consume energy. Most animals eat with their mouths and plants get their food through their roots.
• Movement - It's usually easy to see how animals move, but plants move too! They can bend their stems or branches to face the light and some plants even move to catch their food.
• Excretion - Living things get rid of waste products.
• Growth - All living things grow and change. Some grow a lot and some grow just a little.
• Sensitivity - Living things have some sort of senses, like sight, hearing, touch, or sensitivity to light or heat.
• Reproduction - All livng things produce young. If they didn't there would be no living things!

As it's difficult to notice plants moving, because they do it so slowly, we watched some timelapse videos, including this one.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs G