Tornadoes in Kindergarten?

Have you ever wondered how to get rid of an enemy???  Well, we read a fantastic book about a boy who wants to do just that.  After dreaming up a disgusting pie to feed his enemy, the boy's Dad follows a different recipe for pie, and the boys end up being friends.  Through this book the kids discovered that the best way to lose an enemy is to turn him into a friend!  We wrote a class book called, "How to Lose Your Best Enemy" based on this book, Enemy Pie.  We focused on the Writing Trait of "ideas" and had fun brainstorming lots of ways to turn enemies into friends.  The kids had some really great ideas, like learning his language, inviting her to your birthday party, helping him with his math, asking if he wants to be your friend, or bringing her a treat.  One of the students wondered, "Maybe they are mean because they don't have any friends.  So, if you are their friend, they might not be mean anymore!"  So much wisdom in these little minds!

One of our "Let's Talk" questions at Morning Meeting this week was, "How do you show someone that you love them?"  This ended up turning into a great class group hug....

Kindergarten entered the District Science Fair with a display of our science unit on weather!  Over the last few weeks we have endeavored to answer the kids' questions about weather... We made rainbows, rain, lightning, learned about the states of matter with freezing and thawing of water and snow, climate patterns of the earth, and even made tornadoes!  Here is our display:

 Here the kids are talking to one of the judges about what they have learned about weather...

We made our own tornadoes in a bottle as a part of our weather experiments this week!

We also really enjoyed looking around at the other science projects.  

The kids' favorite was the oobleck station -- Oh, so gooey and fun!!!

Oobleck went right along with Dr. Seuss's birthday, which we celebrated this week on March 2nd!

We read many Dr. Seuss stories and had a Dr. Seuss party where we ate Yurtle the Turtle Cake (below) and watched the Lorax.  We also learned about Dr. Seuss's life.  It was a very sad moment when some of the kids realized that he was a person, and not a cat.  Darn it, I hate it when I burst their bubbles!

This week we also had the fantastic opportunity to do a virtual field trip to the Sea Life Center in Seward to learn about sea birds!  We joined a marine biologist in Seward who showed us puffins and other sea birds at the Sea Life Center, and taught us a little bit about their special adaptations to living in the ocean.  The kids got to make a clay puffin during the class!  

We performed an experiment afterwards to see how oil waterproofs the birds' feathers.  We waterproofed paper and ran it under the faucet to see the droplets run right off!

Finally, here are a few pictures of the kids during their once-a-week free choice center time.  They have developed socially so much this year.  They are mostly able to work out their own conflicts and are getting really good at playing cooperatively together!