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!