Happy Birthday Spike!!!

Today was a special day in our classroom as we celebrated the first birthday of our class pet, Spike the Bearded Dragon. We had a day filled with learning and fun! Check out the pics and videos below!

We measured Spike and he has grown over 9 inches since last year! He is currently 16.5 inches long!

Every student who wanted to was able to feel his dry, scaly, and prickly skin!

If you notice in the pics above, students were holding their "worm journals". These journals contain notes from all of our learning experiences. Today they used the journals to conduct research on Bearded Dragons. After the research was finished, they created tableaus, or living pictures, to share what they had learned.

This group was showing that they had learned the Bearded Dragon's life cycle: 

Egg, young adult, adult. 

This group learned that beardies can eat mice! 

This group showed that someone must care for the beardie by feeding him kale each day.

 The kids loved pretending to be Spike with their "Twizzler" tongues trying to pick up kale. Kale is what we feed Spike each day! After a few minutes of trying, each student tried the kale. Most of them wanted ranch or honey mustard, but a few asked for seconds!

Students participated in progressive drawings. As each group rotated through the visual art station, they added to the picture of Spike's habitat.

Using kidrex.org, students did research about Bearded Dragons

Using Sculpey, students made their own version of a Bearded Dragon.

Every 5 minutes a different group made observations of Spike's behavior and documented it in their journals.

What birthday party wouldn't be complete without a fun game stop!!! Thanks to my niece Taylor for making the game for us!

The students made cards for him last week, and today they were finally able to deliver them! 

This is a special bunch of visitors that we invited to the party! This is last year's class that helped raise the money to buy Spike! We are so grateful that their hard work paid off and continues to help my students learn! They even got their own "Twizzler" tongue. 

The party ended with the coolest lizard party "party favor" ever!!!

... and thanks to our room mom, Mrs. Camp, we had the most awesome cupcakes ever!!! What a great day of learning!!!!

Here are a few videos from the day!