How many seeds?

I know it is just almost Halloween, but the school is already thinking about Christmas!  Ms. Fastenau, the music teacher, would like families to take a minute to take this survey about when we will hold our Christmas concert.  Thank you for your time and input!  Christmas Concert Survey

This week it was finally time to check our decomposing food experiments (remember...a while ago we WONDERED, "Where do all the leaves go that fall off the trees?" and we began a study of fungi and decomposition....) . Well, these gross plates had been sitting on our counter decomposing for weeks! We grabbed the one on from the fridge as well and compared them.  The kids drew pictures of the results, and their overwhelming conclusion was that out of keeping food warm, wet, salty, or cold, keeping food COLD was the best way to slow down decomposition!  Yay for fridges! (Or back porches in Alaska!)

Speaking of gross and slimy 😛, we had lots of fun getting messy while following the steps in our "How to Carve a Pumpkin" essays and carving our class pumpkin!  The kids voted on what kind of face to put on the pumpkin, and Ms. Alexa carved a GREAT scary face for us!!!

We did a couple of activities with counting pumpkin seeds, including dividing the seeds into groups of ten, and counting by 10's all the way up to 365!!!  

Last Friday the kids made spooky bats and spiders to decorate our Poet Tree!

To end our blog, I just wanted to share a moment of beauty that we all took time to appreciate last week!  With the dwindling daylight, we do enjoy one plus... we have enjoyed some gorgeous sunrises!

BOO!k Buddies!

We are fully into Halloween mode, with skeletons, bats, spiders, witches' brew and pumpkin everything!  In writing we are working on sequencing, and so we took the opportunity to write about carving a pumpkin!  (We'll carve our pumpkin following our steps next week!) . We did a guided writing together, and then the kids each wrote their own piece.  Then they made shape jack-o-lanterns to help practice the names of the shapes.  Here is our pumpkin patch!

We were so fortunate this month to have Sonya Bitz come in and teach gymnastics to the kids during P.E.!  Here is a great shot of her teaching them how to jump and stick a landing!  They LOVED learning gymnastics.... thank you so much Mrs. Bitz!!!

We also did some exercises in class to learn about how exercise affects our bodies!  Here the kids are doing some yoga!  

We tried this week in science to answer some of the kids' questions about the heart, such as "What does the heart look like?  What is inside your heart?  How does your heart beat? What happens when we exercise?"  In order to do this, we took our pulse at rest, and after exercise.  We learned how the heart pumps oxygenated blood to our muscles and organs by watching a great video of a real heart beating before it was transplanted.  The kids were amazed, and drew their own pictures of what a REAL HEART looks like!!!  Finally, their favorite center was the "create your own model of a heart" station.  With plastic tubing, turkey basters, and building tubes, the kids got to try out their own pumps and try to model how the heart works!

After we made models of the heart... I used Play Doh to plug up one of the "arteries".  This led to a discussion of cholesterol, and how we can keep our hearts healthy. We talked about healthy eating and avoiding high-fat foods, and sorted the food in our toy kitchen into heart-healthy foods and foods that are not good for our hearts.  (We will get more into nutrition soon!)  We did a messy and fun experiment to see how much fat is in certain foods.  We smooshed foods like donuts, fried chicken, chocolate, apples, and carrots onto a piece of paper to see which ones had the most fat in them.  The ones that were fatty made our paper translucent when we held it up to the light.  

A definite highlight of the week was our Halloween Book Buddies party!  We made a collaborative book with our Fifth Grade buddies called Witches' Brew.  Each Book Buddy pair came up with their own rhymes about what to put in our witches' brew and created an illustration to go with their page.  They were super creative and gross!  Some of their ingredients were bat wings, eyebrows, glue, mud, stinky heads, squished bugs, rotten apples, and guts, just to name a few!  Our book will be displayed in the hallway as a "walking book", so look for it when you come to Trick or Treat Street!

We had fun reading our book together at the end and trying some "real" witches' brew... complete with creepy crawlies, skeletons, eyeballs, and spiders! Hee hee hee!

And finally, in some rather creepy news, I must tell you that the skeleton that I brought into our room to help us learn about bones has been very naughty.  Each night he or she wanders around and gets into our dress up bag... finding a different crazy outfit to wear each day!  The kids are always thrilled in the morning to see what he or she has put on, but as for me, I am not crazy about the idea of a skeleton wandering around our room at night!!!

Curious Kinders

If you want to be inspired, if you want to rediscover wonder, if you want to be curious again, you should try spending time in a Kindergarten class!  

We began our study of the body this week in science.  As we delve into this unit we will spend time wondering about and wondering at the amazing creatures that we are.  Here are some of the things that your kindergarteners are wondering about...

We had a new visitor to our classroom... Mr. Bones the skeleton.  We spent some time with him, exploring what our bones look like, and how our joints fit together.  Then we created some skeletons of our own!  We even played anatomy Hokey Pokey!  ("You put your femur in...") . 

Besides the skeletons, we have had lots of fun making other Halloween decorations, including our footprint ghosts!  

We studied nocturnal animals, and studied how their eyes were different than ours so that they could see better in the dark.  As part of those studies we did experiments on our own eyes to see how our pupils adapted to light.

Then we looked at owl pupils and made Halloween owls!

In reading we read a Photo Essay about nocturnal animals.  We learned about the format of a photo essay, and then we used magazines to collaborate on our own class book:  a photo essay about animals!  

In other reading news... we reached our goal of learning 15 Popcorn Words, and so the students earned a popcorn party!  

This week we took a big leap in writing:  Kid spelling.  My kinders discovered that they can spell!  They chop up a word and write down the sounds that they hear.  (This can also be called inventive spelling or phonetic spelling...) .  The important thing about kid spelling is that the kids are allowed to spell at whatever level they are able.  They will often ask, "Is that right?"  And I will answer, "That looks great!  You heard a lot of sounds!"  or, "Yep!  That is great kid spelling for that word!  They spell it differently in books, but that looks great!"  When we take away the "right" or "wrong" about spelling, then kids are more willing to hear sounds and TRY to translate them into letters, which is an extremely valuable step in reading and writing.  Here the students are presenting their kid spelling labels to the rest of the class.

On Wednesday we had the special treat of having art class with Mrs. Shauna Lee!  The kids worked on painting techniques to create a fall tree.  One of their favorite parts was using the blow drier in between painting steps!  Thank you to Ms. Shauna for volunteering to teach art in our school!

Playing to Learn!

First of all, congratulations to Jocelynn Erickson for achieving Elementary Student of the Month!  Jocelynn was recognized in front of the whole school for her hard work and terrific attitude at school!  Way to go, Jocelynn!

This week as I was looking through the photos I realized just how much we PLAYED!  They say that "kids learn through play"... and I believe that is definitely true!  So, I'd like to show you some of the ways that we played to learn this week! 

In the classroom we studied the sense of sound by making pencil box guitars and taking a slo-mo video to watch how the rubberbands created vibrations!  We also played a sound matching game with easter eggs full of different materials.  The students had to find their "sound match".  They had a great time!

Music class fit in perfectly with our science this week!  Ms. Fastenau showed the kids how to make some "found" instruments using wine glasses and straws to create vibrations!

Continuing our study of senses, we asked, "What wold it be like to try to read if you were blind?"  We tried it out by reading the braille outside of our classroom, and all agreed it would be VERY difficult!  

We finished up our science unit on senses with the sense of touch.  Here the kids are playing Mystery Bag... trying to guess what is in the bag only using their sense of touch.  We also did some Word Work and came up with a huge list of adjectives describing touch, and used those words to help the rest of the class guess what was in the bag!

In reading and social studies this week we learned about how friends play together and follow social rules to get along.  We also read about games around the world!  Then we had game centers in reading to practice playing nicely, taking turns, and following rules.  

We also played BINGO with our Popcorn Words!  Here the kids are making their own BINGO boards by writing down the words they feel are lucky!

On Tuesday our whole class got to go to the District Cross Country Race in Tanacross.  Everyone had a blast!  The kids all finished a half mile race.  Highlights of the day also included playing on different equipment at the Tanacross School playground, like the merry-go-round, and getting temporary tattoos from the State Troopers who attended the event!

The kids also did some beautiful art this week!  They made stained glass-looking leaves, and very cute dot-stamper pictures of ants.

Have a great week!  And don't forget to PLAY!