Dallas Arboretum Field Trip

Last week 1st grade had a beautiful day at the Dallas Arboretum!  Students got to see many kinds of flowers, trees, and other plants!

Can you spot the bee on this flower?

Students explored how seeds travel and many other hands-on activities.

These students made hills and low valleys and then turned on the water to see what effect water would have on their landforms.

In our Tree Works class, students learned about the parts of the tree trunk and how they could tell the age of a tree.  Then they made their own paper plate "tree cookies".

We had a great time!

DFW Earth Day 2014

Today the 1st graders celebrated Earth Day at the airport.  There were live animals, fossils, handouts with tips about protecting the environment and a concert by a band called Vocal Trash featuring instruments made from recycled materials.  Students learned about the life cycle of a butterfly and got to go inside a tent with live butterflies.  They got to see and touch some live animals that we share the earth with like a snake, turtle, skink, tarantula, opossum, chinchilla, and more!  We heard lots of ways to protect our world.  Here are some of our adventures:

We saw all the stages of a butterfly's life cycle: eggs, caterpillars, chyrsalis, and adult butterflies.

The biggest skull below is a sea turtle.

Above are some dragonfly nymphs and other young insects that can be found in water.  Below are some of the live animals we saw.

We also saw a giant model that showed how water can erode the soil.  That does not look like a safe place to build that cabin!

The kids had a great time and should be able to tell their parents lots of ideas about how to protect our world!  And all our chaperones deserve a big thanks for their hard work!

Legoland Field Trip

Yesterday's trip to Legoland was a big hit with the kids!  Like the song says, everything was awesome! We began with the introduction in the factory area:

Then we tried to save the princess by shooting trolls on the laser ride.  Next students had a bit of free play time in the giant climbing area:

Then our group had our building class.  Students learned how to give their structures a strong, wide base to make them less wobbly so they could stand up during an earthquake.  They worked as a team to build tall towers.  Students also learned vocabulary like architect, base, and natural disaster.  Here are some of our sturdy and not-so-sturdy towers:

After our class we had a little more time, so we went to see Miniland, which had fantastic Lego models of many DFW area landmarks:

Our last stop before leaving was to drive the Lego cars.  Here are some great 1st grade drivers:

Thanks so much to all our parent chaperones!  I really appreciated all your work keeping up with our very excited kids!  It was awesome!