Spring has Sprung!

Our room is alive and growing!  Not only with kids, but with plants, butterflies, and chukar eggs!  We are getting outside in this beautiful weather as much as possible.  This is such an exciting time in kindergarten!

We started our chukar partridge eggs this week.  They should hatch around May 12th... Mother's Day!

We are learning about the development of an embryo into a chick... Here the kids are putting the stages in order.

We studied the lifecycle of a butterfly, and kept science journals.  Thursday we were rewarded with one butterfly, and by Friday almost all of them had hatched!

We did butterfly art as well, based on the style of Eric Carle, the author of The Hungry Caterpillar.  

First we painted paper with abstract colors and patters, and then we cut and glued our butterflies together.

Monday was Earth Day!  We celebrated by learning about clean sources of energy and making Earth books.  Then on Wednesday, we helped with the school trash pick up.  The kids were so excited, you would have thought it was an Easter egg hunt.  There was a contest for who could find the coolest piece of trash, so they all wanted pictures with their "cool" trash!  They did find some interesting things!

We also went outside for writing and used our senses to find and write about signs of Spring!

We found a crocus blooming, and so we took it inside to dissect it.  We are learning about the parts of plants and flowers.  We used magnifying glasses and a microscope to look at the different parts.  One of my favorite teaching moments is when a child looks through a microscope for the first time.  💗

We saw cells in the petals and pollen grains, as well as a close up view of the hairs on the stem and sepals.  

We haven't had many April Showers this month... in fact our weather graph is about as sunny as we've had all year!  But we did these cute April Showers bring May Flowers crafts anyway, since we are learning about weather and flowers!

Happy Spring!!!🌞⛈🌈🐛🐣

World Travelers!

We traveled all around the world this week!  We started off with a trip to Europe to learn about Scotland and England, stopped by Costa Rica to go swimming, then finished up the week in Antarctica when our class completed the Read-around-the-World challenge! 

Monday morning started off with some armchair traveling as Nick and Amy Young took us along on their adventure to London and Scotland.  This was the last in our series of presentations to go along with our Read Around the World reading contest!  The kids learned about each continent over the last few weeks. 

Thank you to everyone who faithfully recorded reading minutes at home!  Our class made it all the way around the world by reading over 3500 minutes, and ended up in Antarctica!  

We celebrated with root beer floats, and here are the top two readers by minutes read in our class!  We will finish the contest April 26th.  

After we got back from Scotland, it was off to Costa Rica!  We had a beach party, cracked open a coconut, ate some pineapple and costa rican cookies, and colored butterfly pictures.  I showed the kids some pictures of our trip.  It was so much fun!  

Ms. Brenda Litwack came in on Tuesday to do a nutrition lesson.  We are doing a series of health lessons with her, one each week until the end of the year, as a part of the UAF extension program.  The kids got to taste a food from each of the food groups and learned about balanced meals with the MyPlate system.

Our Painted Lady caterpillars arrived!  We gently put them into little cups with their food, and watched them grow all week.  Each morning we journaled about the changes taking place.  

On Thursday some of the caterpillars were in their cocoons!!!  We journaled about this, and then by lunchtime Friday, ALL of the caterpillars were in their cocoons!  This was so exciting.  We transferred the cocoons to their butterfly habitat, and are anxiously awaiting their hatch, next Thursday or Friday, hopefully!

We are studying weather in science, so we learned about the water cycle and rainbows this week.  Here the kids are recreating rainbows in our classroom on a sunny day!

With all of the sunny gorgeous spring weather we are having, we took the opportunity to take a nature walk for PE on Thursday!

Book Buddies was Wednesday.  We had shared our extra caterpillars with our Book Buddies, so we had a Book Buddies event about the life cycle of butterflies.  We created pasta life cycle wheels, ate butterfly snacks, and read together in the library.  We just love our Book Buddies.  The kids look so forward to getting together.  The kinders really enjoy having that connection with friends in the older grades.  Our Book Buddies in fourth grade are just so kind to the littles, and in return they get lots of love, hugs, and admiration!

With Easter this weekend, we did some fun Easter activities this week, too.  We had a jelly bean hunt at Morning Meeting, put together easter eggs to made words, read Easter stories all week, wrote journal pages about how to help the Easter Bunny, and made swirly shaving cream eggs to decorate the hall!

It always amazes me on Friday how we did so many things in one week...  

These Kinders keep me hopping!  

Happy Easter everyone!!!