We are what we eat!

Fall in Kindergarten is so fun.  Well, every season in Kindergarten is so fun.  

This week we created poetry to decorate our Poet Tree with fall leaves!  These poems are the best, and show some true creativity and talent :) . 

We are learning about healthy food choices and the food groups.  The kids made handprint strawberries and sorted our play food into food groups.  One great talking point at dinner would be to ask your kinder to identify which foods on their plate belong to which food groups!

We had so much fun creating healthy food people for snack one day.  I thought their food people were just amazing, all so unique and awesome!

In reading we learned about Venn diagrams, nonfiction and fiction, and are still working hard on popcorn words as well as our letter sounds, letter names, rhyming, blending sounds together, and "chopping up words" to hear the sounds inside.  

We read a nonfiction story about picking apples and pumpkins and made a Venn Diagram to compare the two!

We got to watch our two T.A.'s play in a high school volleyball game on Friday.  The kinders were the cutest cheerleaders ever!!!

We had a presentation by the DOT about snowplow safety, teaching kids to get out of the way and move away from the side of the road if they see a snowplow coming so they don't get hit by flying snow or buried.  The kids got reflectors and lights to attach to their coats, and got to climb up in the big snowplows.  Honking the horns was by far their favorite part!

We took a tour of our school greenhouse this week, as part of our unit on nutrition.  We got to see where a lot of the veggies that we eat at lunch are grown!  We learned about which colors of light the plants need to absorb, see the new hydroponics unit that the high schoolers are building, see the strawberries that some of the kids planted during the greenhouse camp this summer, and pick a few cucumbers to take back to our classroom!  

We saw where our composted food from lunch goes, and learned about how it makes dirt full of nutrients to feed the new plants, completing the cycle!

We also got to run through the sprinklers and eat freshly picked carrots!  Our school greenhouse is awesome!  Not only does it provide our students with healthy fresh food for much of the year, but it is a great experiential learning opportunity!!!

Ants work together and so do we!

The funny thing about going leaf collecting with kindergarteners, is that sometimes you realize that society tells us what we should think is beautiful.  They were more excited to find the black leaves than anything else!!!  Regardless of what our favorite color of fall leaves was, we all had a fantastic time enjoying an afternoon in the sunshine collecting treasures.

We took them back to the classroom, pressed them between books, and had to wait until the end of the week to see how they turned out!

Friday afternoon we opened our books to discover the pressed leaves and created leaf animals!  

We have the privilege of having two work study High School students this semester helping in our class!  We have Ande Berg in the afternoon (she is in the picture above), and Kaylean Titus in the morning.  It is AWESOME to have such fun helpers with us!  

We worked hard on rhymes this week.  Here are some of the brainstorms we came up with!  One of my students in class said, "Hey, look at those words... they have the same letters at the end!"  I love it when kids make connections and find patterns in their learning!

We also had a GREAT time this week learning about one of the six traits of writing -- Ideas.  We read Henry's Amazing Imagination, by Nancy Carlson.  Inspired by Henry's crazy ideas, we wrote our own fiction story full of crazy ideas!  

We learned how to use the program Book Creator in our KinderTech 101 class, and published our e-book here! 

We are still working hard on our Popcorn Words!  The kids love to be the "teacher" and point to the words for everyone to say!

The Big Event of the week was our ANT FARM!!!!!  We had a hilarious time putting the ants in the farm.  They weren't quite as cold as I thought they were, so they started crawling around everywhere!  We had one farm of red ants, and one farm of black ants.  Turns out that the native black ants are much better survivors, and when there was only one lonely little red ant left, we connected the two farms.  It was so exciting to see the black ants find the tube and start colonizing the other farm too!  

We made lots of great observations, and wrote about them in our journals.  The kids asked great questions, like "Why do ants make tunnels?"  and came up with some good hypotheses.  We did ant research, and watched ant videos, including one about ants making a bridge to get across a gap in their trail.  So of course we had to act that out ourselves....

After watching the ants work together all week to move food, dig tunnels, bury their dead, and make bridges, we created Ant Art!!!  They turned out so cute, and are up on display in the hallway by the gym.

Get.Out.Side.

We were outside as MUCH as possible this week, enjoying the last bit of warm fall weather!  First of all, we started the week with an absolutely gorgeous day at Moon Lake.  THANK YOU so much to all of the parents/brothers/sisters who came with us! And thank you to Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge for providing the canoes! We went canoeing, made boats, went on a walk to look for berries and fall leaves, got to watch a float plane land and take off a couple of times, collected aquatic insects, and had a picnic, complete with a bonfire and s'mores, and plenty of just chill time playing on the beach and in the sand!  We could not have asked for a better day, and we all decided school should be like that all the time!

Then on Tuesday, we went outside by the school track and picked cranberries... we were on a mission.  We needed cranberries to make cranberry muffins for our Book Buddies, as you will see later!

Back in the classroom, we had a great time reading a recipe and stirring, mixing, measuring and making a wonderfully yummy mess! 

We invited our 4th Grade Book Buddies to a muffin party on Wednesday!  We read, If You Give a Moose a Muffin and had fun writing a collaborative story called, If You Give a Tok Student a Muffin...  It is still a work in progress, and I will share the published e-version soon!  We also got a chance to read books in the library with our buddies.  We will be getting together once a month all year!  

We earned a Popcorn Party this week by learning 10 popcorn words!  Every time we learn 10 more words in class on our word wall, we will have a party!  (Kids can go at their own pace with the words that come home, as fast or as slow as they need to, but we will continue to learn several a week in class as well...)

In math we continue to fill in our hundreds chart and look for patterns.  We also are learning about even and odd numbers, equal, and greater than/less than.  Here the kids are learning symmetry and even and odd by using pennies to make symmetrical dots on their ladybugs.  

We did a journal write this week based on Shel Silverstein's book, The Giving Tree, one of my all time favorites!  Here is our "word tree" from our brainstorming session.  These are some of the things the kids would like to give if they had a "Giving Tree!"  

Here are a couple of pictures of our daily routine!  Writing on the Morning Message board, having Morning Meeting, eating lunch, and playing at recess!