Frobscottle!

Happy Mother's Day!  Every single one of the kindergarteners worked so hard to make really special Mother's Day gifts for their Moms... I hope you can feel the love they have for you!  We also worked on similes this week in reading... comparing things using "like" or "as".  We did Mother's Day similes, (My Mom is as ______ as a ________) and the kids came up with very creative comparisons about their special moms!

Amanda Atla came in to our classroom on Monday to share with us some things from the Athabascan culture.  She showed the kids furs from many animals, and the beautiful things she had made from moose, caribou, snowshoe hare, wolf, coyote, porcupine, and fox.  Then she helped the kids bead their own necklaces. 

Math Centers:  This week I thought I would share some of the things we do in math.  This week we worked on a balance, measuring weight with nonstandard units.  

We also experimented with different sized containers and learned the names for gallons, quarts, pints, and cups.  We practiced estimating, and tried to guess how many cups each container could hold, and then filled them up to see how close we were.  We drew conclusions about how many pints fit in a quart, how many quarts fit in a gallon, and inferred, then, how many cups were in a gallon.  Lots of fun, wet experimenting!

This week we also introduced the concept of greater than or less than.  Here the kids are doing human greater than or less than symbols to talk about height.

Our preying mantis egg sac hatched this week!  So many tiny preying mantises crawled out of the egg sac, it was like clowns coming out of a tiny car!  The kids kept busy at recess catching small insects for them to eat!

FROBSCOTTLE PARTY!!!  We are reading the BFG for our after-lunch read aloud book.  We read the chapter on Frobscottle and whizzpopping this week, so of course, had to try the "pale green fizzy liquid" that the Big Friendly Giant calls Frobscottle!  It was scrumdiddlyumptious, and was a hilarious time, with kids whizzpopping all over the place.  It was great fun.  We are having a good time noticing all of the great words that the BFG uses!!!

Unfortunately, the kids have learned to read this year, so even though I told them that the drink was called Frobscottle, one of them said, "Hey, this can't be Frobscottle.  The name on the bottle starts with a K!"  And another one came up and said, "Wait a minute, this says 'Kirkland Kiwi Strawberry Ice!'" It's hard to pull one over on them anymore... 

Dancing With the Spirit is a group of musicians that visited Tok all week and taught the kids daily music lessons.  They learned to play folk songs on the ukelele and fiddle.  They had so much fun singing and dancing first thing every morning for a half hour, and then performing in the concert on Friday!  This was such a great program for our elementary students, who don't get music class besides what we do in our regular classroom.  Thank you so much to the visiting musicians, and for the AGSD District for bringing this program to Tok School!  The kids did a great job performing in their concert, and we really enjoyed watching the other classes perform, too!

Last but not least, the kids earned another party this week, so we transformed our classroom into a bouncy house, and here they are... bouncing their way into the last 2 weeks of school!  Ten more days to go... but who's counting?!