We are loving Spring!!!

We had such a great time at our Book Buddies sledding party on the 16th!  S'mores all around! Our aide Ms. Jocelyn even tried her very first s'more ever!  She said she wasn't a big fan... too sweet. 😂

We did a mini dinosaur unit, and made dinosaur fossils, as part of our study of geology!

We finished up our space unit as well, learning about stars and constellations.  We made pokey pin constellations!

The kinders all created a constellation and then wrote an original legend to go with it!

We also learned about stars of different colors.  We used a lighter to demonstrate that different temperatures of fire are different colors, and stars are the same way.  The kids were fascinated to learn about the life cycle of stars, and how many stars are in the universe!  Then we made colored star cookies by melting hard candy in the middle!

Last week we had a unit on rain and rainbows and color.  We began with Dr. Seuss's book, My Many Colored Days, and discussed how our feelings relate to colors.  Then we drew pictures of the colors we were feeling that day. 

We made mini water cycles in a cup, by putting hot water in the cup and watching as it evaporated and then condensed on the plastic into big drops that then fell down back into the cup!  We wrote in our journals about our experiment. 

Adding a little creativity into our rain unit, we read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and wrote about what we would have it rain out of the sky!  We had everything from 100 dollar bills to sparkly clothes and rainbow cotton candy coming out of our clouds!

We went outside after learning about how rainbows are made, and made our own rainbows with cups of water on a very sunny day!

We learned about color theory by mixing different colors of cookie dough to make all of the colors of the rainbow.  Then we layered the different colors into rainbow swirl cookies!

We are LOVING Spring!!!  The kids are enjoying the puddles that are fast disappearing.  Collecting water beetles was the favorite activity this week at recess!  

Spring also means lots of living things in our classroom!  We have preying mantis egg sacs, luna moth cocoons, painted lady caterpillars, and duck eggs incubating!!!

The kids earned a bouncy house party on Friday by getting their rocket to the sun!  The kids had a fun surprise after recess to come into our room  and find it filled with a bouncy house!

 

Rock cycle, paper airplanes, puppies, and bugs!

Never a dull moment in our class... that seems to be the motto for this year!  One thing I love about my job is that on Monday you'd never guess what will happen by Friday. :) 

This week began with with continuing our study of the Earth and geology.  We learned about gems and minerals and mining, and then went cookie mining!  We used pick axes (toothpicks) to mine gems (M&M's) out of the dirt (cookies).  Then we graphed the gems we found!  Of course we ate the gems afterwards!

We are working hard on becoming independent writers, including the skills of being able to chop of up words, hear the individual sounds, and translate them into letters.  We call this "kid spelling".  And once kids achieve this milestone and realize they can write phonetically, even if it isn't the proper spelling,they are so excited to be able to communicate this way!  Having your child write notes and letters and signs at home is a great way to practice these skills!  Here the kids are enjoying some small group time with our wonderful aides to practice independent kid spelling...

We had one of the subs in the school, Brandon, come in and teach the kids how to use a range finder and practice skills like estimating and measuring yards and feet.  They enjoyed hearing about the application of this kind of math in hunting and construction! 

In science we had a yummy lesson on the rock cycle!  We used Starbursts to create layered sedimentary rock.  Then we squeezed and twisted it to become metamorphic type rocks.  Then we put those "rocks" into the oven to create igneous rocks!  We looked at real examples of each kind of rock as we went along.  Edible science is the best!  

We got to visit with the cutest puppy this week! Mr. Larrabee brought in his new Bernie Doodle puppy named Asha to see the kids.  She was so mellow and cuddly! Everyone loved her. 

Ms. Michele from the greenhouse brought us a preying mantis egg sac to hatch out in our room.  It hatched the very next day, with hundreds of preying mantises crawling out!  It was so much fun to watch them hatch! Then we released them in the greenhouse to help eat some of the aphids.  The kids got to pick a radish while they were there.  The greenhouse is looking amazing!   Go Michele!  This is just the beginning of the creatures we plan to have in our room this spring... ladybugs, butterflies, and ducks still to come!!!

Friday afternoon was the perfect time for a paper airplane STEM project.  We built a glider from a kit, and then the kids made their own paper airplanes, and we had a great time tweaking them to fly better.  Some kids cut in flaps or tried different designs.  They have been so excited about planes ever since our field trip to Forty Mile Air, so this was such a fun project!!!  It kept going all through P.E., when the kids were flying and chasing their planes all around the gym, and got the other grades in on it too!!!