Sharing the Planet!

Last week we finished up our first unit Who We Are...well mostly! We still need to dive more into the Learner Profile and Attitudes, but we made a good start. We actually reflected and added work to our portfolios (more on that soon!)... which was a first. Usually we are reflecting on two or three units at at time, but this year I really want my kids to be proud of what they are putting in their portfolios. I would love to meet with parents at some point to have kids share with their parents about their work. I think the more they are internalizing their learning, the more transdisciplinary it will be!

Our provocation to start out our new unit, Sharing the Planet, was a little nature walk. I gave each student a ziploc and told them to go collect some earth.--whatever they thought the earth was. So they ran out of the building and "Collected Earth"! It was so interesting to see what they came up with... and for the most part they were right on target! (it double as a preassessment too! :) )
It was starting to sprinkle so one girl wanted to collect the rain... "Is rain the earth?" she asked me!

We will use these collections for more investigations!

Today I read Our Big Home and then they shared some questions they had...

We went off on a little tangent on what is a country vs state, but while we were exploring the world on google maps we talked about the difference between land and water too. It's all learning! I love it! 

Here are some of the questions they asked:

Not all are supposed to be covered in this unit...the ones about if the whole earth has the sun at the same time are technically another unit, but I'm sure we will get them answered now too! ;)