By May in the Orca class, the children have formed quite a community. They listen and work well together, and we are able to do many wonderful things. Writing in our journals gave many children a real sense of pride. "I'm on journal number three!" They even told us if what their writing was fiction or non-fiction, something we learned from our library experience.

Of, course, there was always time for silliness and laughter.

This class really enjoyed working together to make streams, rivers and lakes in the sand area.

The children wrote lots of books, some at school, and often at home as well. This girl wrote an amazing book about the human body with great illustrations. She read it to us after snack one day.

Our spring quarter Eco School goal (http://www.nwf.org/Eco-Schools-USA.aspx) was Healthy Living. One part of this is encouraging more active time spent outdoors. We made a workout course on the playground.

It had different stations where we had to do different things, like jump over three buckets.

We had charts to mark how many times we did the course.

We invited our parents to do the course with us.

We loved getting the sharing bag and taking turns bringing in something to share. This boy wrote the words to a favorite song from

Hello Dolly

, and sang along with the CD as he shared the words. Then we all danced to the music.

As a part of learning about the sea and the creatures that live there we decided to create an Ocean Museum. We chose four zones in the ocean: the beach, shallow water, a coral reef, and deep water.

We worked together to make each zone. This is the coral reef being built out of recycled boxes.

We chose animals that live in the zones to make. We used books as resources when we made our sea creatures.

When the museum was ready, we shared it with our parents. Each child in the zone was able to tell about the animal they had learned about and made for the zone. This is the coral reef.

This is the beach.

There were many different animals in the coral reef.

We made signs and wrote down what we wanted others to know about the animals.

Sometimes we worked toegether, sharing our skills to make them.

We put the signs next to our animals.

This is the deep ocean. The animals seemed to be larger here. This is a seal.

This is the biggest one of all, the blue whale.

Closer to shore the water is shallower. Different animals live here.

We invited the Dolphin class to tour our museum. The Dolphins listened, amazed at what the Orca children had done. Then the Dolphins wrote the Orcas thank you notes and told them what they liked best.

Each quarter we drew a new self-portrait. The first three were of our faces, and were done with black Sharpie on white paper. They hung in the classroom next to our photos.

The last self-portrait was of our whole body, and after drawing them, we got to paint them with watercolors.

It is very interesting to see how we grow and develop, and how our drawing grows and develops as we master better control of the pen. Also, our attention to details changes throughout the year.

Finally we made our critter movie. It was hard work, making a stop animation movie. We had to be very patient as we slowly moved our critters a tiny bit each time. We loved how the movie turned out!

One day we set up a tent outside and played we were camping. We cooked our meal over the fire. Then a tornado came, and we had to escape to the ranger station.

We visited our friend's bakery.

We got a tour of the kitchen, and went on a treasure hunt in the shop. Then we bought a loaf of yummy bread to have for our snack.