Growing!!!

 Our bean plants are thriving!   Mr. Young has transplanted them from the jar to a lovely pot.

The marigold seeds we planted last Friday have also sprouted!   We are so excited!!!

Fish, Four Winds, and Fun with Plants!

We have new classroom pets! 

Here are Big Fish and Little Fish.   They are here to help us learn more about our Science unit: Living & Non-living.

As soon as they came into the room, the students wanted to write about them!

  

They seem to like their new office space!

Four Winds

This week, Mr. Carr and Mr. Larsen from the 4 Winds program came in to help us learn about animal and plant defenses.  We learned that defenses are the ways in which plants or animals protect themselves  to keep safe.

After a great puppet show, the students shared what they had learned:

• Porcupines defend themselves with quills.
• Turtles have a hard shell as a defense.
• Some animals are bright colors and poisonous.
• Worms can defend themselves because they are slippery and slimy - that helps them to escape!
• Plants like raspberries and roses have sharp thorns as a defense!

Fun with Plants!

Check out our bean seeds/plants now!!!

Today we finished our own 3 dimensional flower diagrams too.

We also planted our own seeds!  Thank you Mr. Young for our planting pots and for filling them with soil.

Spring is Coming!

Spring is coming!

Science:

In science we are learning about living and non-living things in our world.  We have begun this unit with plants.  We have beans sprouting!

We have been learning that plants are living and have 5 needs:  water, soil, space, air, and sunlight.

We have learned that living things move and grow.

As part of this unit, we read Jack and the Beanstalk, watched a video of a bean plan growing, and are crafting and labeling our own beautiful flowers!

Writing:

We have been writing opinion pieces about why we like our flowers.  We know that an opinion is what a person thinks or feels about a book/story, or anything else in the world.  We think about our 5 senses to help us explain and support our reasons for our opinion.  We know that everyone is allowed their own opinion, even if we disagree.  

The Common Core requires kindergarten students to be able to:

Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is...).

Math:

We recently read Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews.  In this book, Mr. Crews uses his imagination to transform quantities of dots into pictures.  

We then used our own 10 dots (bright orange!) to make beautiful butterflies!  Students chose their own combinations of dots to make 10 in order to decorate their butterfly.

 

We are also exploring dominoes to increase or understanding of addition. Here are some pictures of students playing a fun game, Domino Path.  This game incorporates counting, subitizing (recognizing number immediately without having to count), addition, number recognition, verbal communication, and turn taking!