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!!!

Lucky Little Leprechauns!

We had fun with St. Patty's Day before we left for Spring Break... and hope the trap the kids made caught a leprechaun in our classroom!  

On our Pots of Gold in this picture, the kids each wrote a mini essay about what makes them feel lucky!  One of the kids wrote, "I feel lucky when I get a job as a principal!"  So does our new Principal for next year, I am sure!!!

The rainbows you see in this picture are actually fraction strip rainbows!  We did paper folding to compare fractions in order up to 1/8.  The kids made many awesome discoveries during this activity, including the idea that the denominator shows how many pieces it is folded into, the bigger the denominator the smaller the pieces, and to get 1/6 from 1/3, you have to divide each piece by 2, and the same for 1/8 from 1/4.  We are having lots of fun with our Intro to Fractions unit!

We really enjoyed our Book Buddies sledding party on Wednesday!  It was such gorgeous weather!  We had s'mores by the fire and just enjoyed a beautiful spring day with our 4th grade buddies.  Thank you to the parents who came and helped!

Try keeping a surprise party a secret with 8 kindergarteners.  They say things like, "Shhh!!!  Don't tell her about the You Know What!"  We celebrated Ms. Alexa's birthday on Thursday.  She is very loved by our whole class, including me!  I don't know what we would do without her.  She is such a great asset to our class and the whole school.  She is a very talented teacher with awesome creativity and a natural gift for working with kids!  Alexa is one of those people that does what you were going to ask her to do before you even thought of doing it yourself.  Happy birthday Alexa!

I am excited that I just got certified to belay on the rock wall in the gym!  So we are now able to take turns on the wall during our P.E. station rotations, and it has been SO fun!  The kids are testing not only their physical strength but stretching themselves to conquer their fear and have such a feeling of accomplishment when they do!

We began a unit in science electricity and magnets.  The kids made some cool discoveries about electricity using these circuit boards!  We did some experiments about conductors and insulators, and figured out how to make a light bulb light up in a circuit!

I love it when their faces "light up" like this!  I always knew my students were "bright"!