Our Brains Are Growing!

Our class made lots of mistakes this week!  We watched a movie called "The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes" and learned that when we make mistakes, our brains grow!  After we exercised to make our muscles grow, we learned that mistakes are like exercise for our brain, and when we learn from our mistakes, our brains grow!  Funny how after that lesson, kids were happily making mistakes all over the place!!!  

We had a wonderful time planting birch trees with Tok Forestry, and learning about how trees use cholorophyll to make their own food, and why they turn colors in the fall.  Our class has three birch trees by the front of the school, and the kids are watering and caring for "their" trees!  It will be fun to watch the trees grow as the kids do... I wonder how big they will be on graduation day 2030?!

We also took the beautiful fall leaves we collected last week out of the plant presses and used them to create various creatures, like caterpillars, birds, and mice!  

We continued our studies of fall leaves by making handprint trees for art with Ms. Alexa on Friday.  The kids all loved painting their hands, and discovering how to make orange by mixing colors.   The pictures turned out beautifully and will be up in the hallway on the KinderArt wall!

Our popcorn words keep popping!  Here the kids are teaching each other and playing a game with the popcorn word wall.  Thank you for all of your practice at home!  

In science we are learning about our five senses.  The kids took some time to be curious about senses and asked some great questions, such as, "How do our ears work?" and "Can bunnies taste things?"  We will explore more of their questions next week.  We experimented with TASTE this week, and here the kids are seeing how their sense of sight and smell affect their ability to taste.

We continued our study of TASTE by making cranberry muffins with the berries we picked a few weeks ago.  There were delicious!  We learned how important it is to know our numbers so that we can follow a recipe!

We shared our muffins with our Book Buddies on Friday at our first Book Buddies event.  It was a HUGE success!  Thank you to Michele Erickson, Alexa Peet, and the fifth grade teacher Mrs. Dunning for helping!  The kinders were each paired with a fifth grade buddy, and then went to the We Love Books cafe, where they were formally seated at tables and had a Book Tasting Party!  Each group had a book to "taste" as the big buddies read to the little buddies, and then afterwards were served the food that they read about!  They read books such as, The Carrot Seed, Chicks and Salsa, Bread and Jam for Francis, Blueberries for Sal, and of course, If You Give a Moose a Muffin!  The buddies had a fantastic time together, and then got to play together at recess.  They were all asking to do Book Buddies again right away!  This is a win-win for kinders and fifth graders, since the kinders get someone to read to them and encourage their love of books, as well as getting to know some of the older kids in the school.  The fifth graders get to practice their oral reading fluency and develop relationships with little people full of hugs and admiration!

We have some new critters in our room!  Our ANTS finally came in the mail, all the way from South Carolina, living on a slice of potato!  We put them into our ant farm on Friday, so we will be observing them, writing about them, and learning how we can work together as a class, just like the ants do!

Moon Lake Field Trip!

We had the most beautiful fall field trip to Moon Lake this week!  We went with the first and second grades and did a station rotation, learning about the water cycle, aquatic insects, and canoeing!  Here is Ms. Bonnie teaching the kids the water cycle.

Brandy Baker with Alaska Fish and Game out of Delta came down to help the kids collect aquatic insects and identify them!

Time for a picnic lunch!

The kids all went canoeing at the end of the day.  Some were nervous and had their first canoeing experience ever, but every single one of the kids went out on the water and did such a great job paddling!  It was such a gorgeous day to be out on the lake!  Thank you to Patricia Young and Chris and Michele Erickson for helping out, and to Tetlin Wildlife Refuge for providing the canoes!

Climbing the Walls!

This week in P.E. we took advantage of a rainy day to try out the rock wall in the gym!  These guys are awesome little climbers!!!

In reading we are working on rhyming, comprehension and sequencing with the story Jazz Baby!   The class had a great time getting out our instruments and making some music after we read the story.  Then they practiced putting the story in order and worked on oral retelling skills.  We are continuing to work on letter sounds, letter ID, and "popcorn" words.  Because of the short week next week, the following week after Moose Days will be our first week with take home Popcorn Word folders.  

We continue to write in our journals several times a week... the kids' progress in writing is evident already!  We are really working on friendship and creating a classroom community, so this week I read the kids one of my favorite books of all time, The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.  Then we talked about what kinds of things we would like to grow on our tree to give our friends and wrote about it in their journals!  Here is what the kids came up with during our brainstorming session!

In math we are exploring the concept of "equal" and learning the equals sign.  Once again we did Math in a Cultural Context (MCC Math) to help the kids understand this concept.  We watched a short video about Dora, a native woman whose family did commercial fishing in Bristol Bay with sailboats.  She talked about what would happen if the boats were loaded unequally.  Then we got out Playdoh to see if we could load our boats equally so they wouldn't tip over!  The kids used their bodies as a balance to "weigh" the balls and worked together with their team to figure out how to load their boats!  They were so excited when they got their boats to float!

Then we got out our balance and tried to make two balls equal to each other.  The extra challenge was then to make two halves equal to one whole ball.  It was a great intro to fractions!

Luckily the weather turned gorgeous later in the week and we were able to go out with Tim Lorenzini from Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge and do some plant ID and leaf collecting!

When we got back into the classroom Tim showed us how to use a plant press to press our leaves.  We'll check them in a week or so and see how they turned out!   Thanks to Tim and Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge for another fun outing!