Happy Halloween!

Happy H-A-Double L-O, W-Double E-N!

We had such a fun day!  This is our class right before the costume parade around the school.  After the parade we had a Halloween Party in our room... beginning with spooky touchy-feely story about Poor Old Joe and his body parts!  (We are studying bodies in science, after all!).   We felt a Spam tongue, peeled grape eyeballs, cold spaghetti brains... well, you get the idea!  Then it was on to the Mummy Race, Halloween Four Corners, and lots of yummy treats!  Thank you so much to all of the family members who came to our party or contributed snacks!  We loved sharing our day with you!

But alas, all good things must come to an end, and Wednesday we were back at it...  

We have started doing "circus math".  We rotate through a Three Ring Circus every day.  One ring is Redbird math on the computer, an adaptive math program that targets skills at each child's level.  (They can access this program at home through our blog, and are free to go as far as they like at home! 😉)

One ring of the circus is a hands-on math manipulative.  Here the kids are  playing a dice game and making shape graphs depending on what number they roll on the dice.  

And finally, the third ring is Teacher Time, where we meet in groups and go over the lesson concept for the day.

In science this week we built on our studies of the nervous system and brain, and learned about the muscular system.  

One of the kids' questions when we began our unit was, "How do our muscles move?"  So we played spinal cord telephone, a silly game I made up to show the kids how nerve impulses travel from the brain, down the spinal cord and to the muscles to make them move.  We started with a thought in the "brain"(the first child in line), and passed the message down the line to the "muscle" (the child at the end), who then had to perform the action that the brain thought up!  The action  in this picture was "stick out your tongue!"

Here the kids are putting some of the different systems together on the body.  Next week:  the digestive system!

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!