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.
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