Winter Explorations

We continued our explorations of weather and snow this week.  Last week we found out that snow melts into water that takes up much less volume than the snow.  The kids hypothesized that it might have been because the water evaporated.  SO... to test that, we tried our experiment again, but this time put plastic wrap over the top of our cups to make sure evaporation didn't remove any water.  Guess what?  STILL less water than snow!  We wondered WHY?!  So we got out the magnifying glasses and looked at snow crystals outside.  The kids were able to see that there were actually many many little spaces between the snow crystals.  

Our class has had a really good time doing research to find out how different animals survive the winter.  We are working on a writing and art project to publish our findings.  Next week we will share our research with each other by presenting in front of the class!

Happy Chinese New Year!  Chinese New Year begins on the first new moon of the year, so we celebrated on Friday!  We ate looooong noodles for a long life, and oranges for a sweet life.  Using chopsticks made for lots of fun...in fact, the kids all wanted to bring their chopsticks to lunch to keep practicing!  We happened to be having pizza for lunch, but they still tried to pick up their pizzas with chopsticks.  It was quite hilarious!  

We also made dragon masks and we will join the third grade next week in a parade around the school to bring in the Year of the Rooster!

Three of our kindergarteners are on the Tok Mites hockey team!  They played in a tournament in Delta this weekend, and I had the privilege of watching them skate.  They are doing awesome!  Great job Nolan Roslansky, Aiden Gross, and Sawyer Fitting!!!

Hard work in Kindergarten! (Disguised as FUN!)

Our new unit in Science is all about the weather.  We spent some time this week being curious about weather and thinking of all kinds of questions we'd like to answer.  The kids learned about the water cycle last week...and made these awesome models of how it works.

As part of our study of the weather, we did an experiment to see how much water was in snow.  The kids were very surprised to find out just how little water snow contains.  They came up with some good ideas for why this might be, ranging from, "Eragon drank it" and "Maybe it evaporated," to "Snow is made of big chunks, and when it melts it comes together closer."  We will do further experiments to test these hypotheses!

In reading we studied Stellaluna, and here are some students drawing the characters on the board.  The main characters are in big letters, and the less important characters are in smaller letters.  In language we are also studying nouns, verbs (the kids thought that was such a strange word... and if you say it about 5 times, you realize that it really IS!), and adjectives.  We had fun practicing parts of speech with Ms. Madison our TA by dividing into groups and making up Mad Libs and then reading our silly stories to each other!  

In reading our theme for this unit has been animals.  We made up animal poems and put them, along with some beautiful snowflakes, up on our winter Poet Tree!  Some of the awesome poems were, "Bear, bear, little brown bear, went to Aimee's to cut his hair,"  "Whale, whale, little blue whale, went to the ocean to splash his tail," and "Fox, fox, little orange fox, went to kindergarten to play with blocks."  We had fun creating rhymes based on the book, "Llama, Llama, Red Pajama".

The kids earned a party by working hard and blasting off our rocket all the way from Pluto back to the sun!  We voted and decided on a Beach Party!  So here we are, pretending we are at the beach.  We had pineapple, coconut, popsicles, and cold lemonade.  We dressed up in summer clothes, played beach ball, laid out on our towels and listened to the waves.  It was a nice break from -40!

Happy 2017!

It is very fun to finally all be back together again!  (Minus one still soaking up some sun!)  I brought some of Costa Rica back with me to share with the kids.  We learned about Costa Rican money called colones, and listened to the ocean in some shells.  I showed the kids some pictures of the Friends School in Monteverde, Costa Rica where I got the grand tour from my brother who teaches there.  The Kindergarten class has a pet cat that lives in the classroom.  After the kinders found that out, everyone wanted to move to Costa Rica to go to school!  One thing that I was very impressed with at the Friends School is their "Peace Corner".... a place where students can go to resolve conflicts in the classroom.  I showed the kids pictures of the Peace Corner (below), and told them that we will start a Peace Corner in our classroom.  This backfired, however, when a couple of girls started conniving together to have an issue so they could visit the Peace Corner!

We drank coconut water and cracked open a coconut to eat the inside.  

Ms. Shauna Lee came in to give us a geology show and tell about obsidian.  This obsidian was special because it was made in our very own school boiler!

We celebrated Olivia's birthday this week, and she earned the Pet Shop prize card, so her kitty Twister got to come to her birthday party!  

Please excuse the fuzzy photos in this post.  I am getting used to a new camera!   But this is our class at reading working on story order as well as vocabulary and retelling skills with the Ugly Duckling.

In science we are started a new unit learning about weather and seasons.  Here we are doing an experiment about about the water cycle.  After coming up with some hypotheses, we created a mini water cycle in a cup!  We learned about evaporation and condensation by putting hot water in a cup and watching water droplets form on the plastic on top.  After the experiment we made good use of our hot water by making hot cocoa 😊.