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!