First, then, last!

We were all about the Little Red Hen this week.  It is such a great story to finish up our unit on nutrition (the grain group), and our unit on Working Together!  We also used it to focus on one of our six traits of good writing, Organization.  The kids had to put the story in order and make their own books to take home.  Hopefully they brought home their little books and told you the story, in order!  

We did sequencing puzzles this week to support the trait of Organization, and compared a story to a train, with an engine (beginning), train cars (the middle) and a caboose (the end.) . We are also writing recipes with first, then, last instructions.  

So, speaking of recipes, we followed a recipe to make bread!  The kids got to try wheat grains, and learned about how they get ground up into flour that we use to make breads.  We also did a science experiment with yeast, and saw how the gasses it released blew up a balloon, just like they make bubbles in our bread! 

Cooking with Kinders is so much fun.  They L.O.V.E.D. kneading the dough.  Several of them said, "This is my best day EVER!"  Well, that was easy!  

Our bread turned out to be very delicious, mostly because of all of the kneading!  We ALL got to eat some because we ALL worked together to make it!  Nothing like hot fresh bread right out of the oven!!!

The kids are cruising right along in math.  We do some math on our adaptive Redbird program on the computer, and then our regular paper/pencil math (with lots of hands on counters, like teddy bears).  

Often the kids partner up and teach each other.  Teaching is the best way to learn!

The kids have really enjoyed our listening center in the Reading Jungle.  There are iPods with dozens of books loaded onto them, and the kids know how to scroll down to the book they want, listen to it, and follow along by turning the pages.  We even had a special guest in the reading jungle this week!

We started the program Keyboarding Without Tears this week in Kindertech 101 (our kindergarten STARS pod class).  The kids love it so far, and we will continue throughout the year, reinforcing keyboarding skills which are so important!  Just a note on the STARS classes:  All of the elementary students switch classrooms for the last hour or so of the day, to interest based pod classes, called STARS classes (Science, Technology, Arts, Regional and global awareness, and Service.) We have been a self-contained kindergarten pod class for this first quarter, called Kindertech 101.  We have focused on getting the kids up to speed on the tech that the school uses, like learning how to access the programs independently, get on Google Classroom and complete an assignment, and learning keyboarding and digital citizenship.  Now, for the last couple of weeks of the quarter, we are focusing on beginning computer coding!  A paper came home last week with the STARS class choices for the next quarter.  Please discuss with your child his or her interests, and return it to me by Oct. 12.  We will do our best to get each child into their first or second choice class. 

We had an absolute ball today playing with Bee Bots, which introduce the kids to the concept of coding.  They were encouraged to discover how the Bee Bots work on their own, and through that process, discover how to tell the Bee Bot what to do, which is really what coding is all about.  They are getting it!  We will work some more with them, and soon get to the point where the kids can code the Bee Bots to perform certain tasks, like go through a maze.

We also got to experiment with OzBots, which are tiny robots that respond to colors and black lines on paper.  We had fun coloring in the codes and then creating pathways for the OzBots to follow!  We'll work more with these, too.  It's truly amazing to see the kids just experiment, try things out, learn from mistakes and figure technology out for themselves.  They are truly fluent in the language of tech already, and aren't afraid to just TRY things and see what works.  It is exciting to be a teacher just sitting back and watching all of this great critical thinking and creativity going on!