Ms. Deb's Kindergarten: Cool Critters!

Spring is here, and we are enjoying discovering how the world wakes up from winter! We are anxiously watching and waiting as our new critters get ready to hatch and go through metamorphosis!

Our Painted Lady Butterfly caterpillars arrived, and the kids put caterpillar food into little cups and each chose 2 caterpillars to be their very own.

We are keeping an observation journal about how they are growing, molting, and changing!

We also are waiting for our praying mantis egg case to hatch! It is supposed to have over 100 praying mantises in it!

Here is Ladybug Land! We watched them turn from larvae to pupa last week!

And finally, we have chukar partridge eggs that should be hatching the middle of May!

Of course, we still have our old pal Eragon, the Bearded Dragon! The kids enjoy feeding him his worms.

We spent last week learning about another creature that we DON'T have in our classroom, thank goodness! We studied about dinosaurs in reading, and imagined and wrote about what it would be like if they DID come back to school! We read some fantasy and some reality books about dinosaurs, and learned about fossils and made some plaster fossils of our own. They turned out great!

We also read a story about real dinosaur tracks and then made dinosaur tracks of our own all the way to the playground!

We got to celebrate Easter (a little bit late) with our Book Buddies on Tuesday. Our 5th grade Buddies found some eggs outside on the playground that the Easter Bunny had hidden, and we all went on an egg hunt to try to match up lowercase and uppercase letters. Then it was on to ANOTHER hunt, this time for jelly beans in the library! The Buddies had a great time munching on jelly beans and reading books together.

We celebrated Earth Day all week by writing and talking about what we could do to help the Earth. We also made shaving cream painted Earths... very gooey, but lots of fun. They were beautiful.

We combined Earth Day with our study of electricity by learning about the different ways to make electricity, and the pros and cons of each. Then we did an experiment to find out which materials conduct electricity better. The kids were GREAT little scientists, coming up with their hypotheses, then designing their own experiments to test them, and recording the results. I was so impressed with all of their labeled drawing of their circuits and the sentences they wrote!

We had the most delicious math class EVER when we took a field trip to Fast Eddies on Friday! Thank you so much to the Youngs for putting together a fun lesson for us on pizza fractions! First the kids had to spread HALF of their cheese on their WHOLE pizza. Then they put different toppings on each HALF or FOURTH of their pizza. Then they sprinkled on the other HALF of the cheese.