Diwali

On Tuesday, there was a special visitor that came to talk to all of the kindergarten classes.  It was Anitha Narayanasamy, Pritesh's mom.  She came to teach us about the celebration of Diwali.  Diwali, also known as Deepavali and the "festival of lights" is an ancient Hindu festival celebrated in the fall every year.

   

Anitha was very brave…speaking to three kindergarten classes at one time!  

   

She showed us some amazing photographs and some really cool artifacts that her family actually uses when they celebrate Diwali.

 We really learned lots from her visit.  Today we did some community writing to thank her!

If you happen to know anyone who celebrated Diwali (and we do!), be sure to wish them "Happy Diwali!"

Fall Celebration

Thanks to everyone who made our Fall Celebration possible  today.  We really had a great time and are so grateful for our amazing volunteers!  Enjoy the photos!

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

Observing and Sketching Trees

We decided to head outdoors again and take an even closer look at a tree in our school yard.

   

Wow…it is really a beautiful tree.  It's a red oak (at least that is what Breckin told me.  He is going to teach us how to identify a red oak tree!)  We talked about how the tree looked and what the parts of the tree were.  We identified the trunk, bark, branches and leaves.   We really observed it closely which was going to be very helpful to us in a little while.

   

One thing scientists do is record their learning in a journal or notebook.  When we returned to the classroom, we got out our Science Journals and started sketching the tree we observed.  We were careful to include all of the things we saw.

   

When we finished, we spent some time admiring each other's work.  We could see our work by putting it on the document camera and projecting the image on the SMART Board.  Then we got to explain our drawing to the class.  It was pretty cool!

   

Trees

We launched a new unit of study this week…trees!  We started out filling in the part of our RAN chart titled "What I Think I Know…".  We wrote down all the ideas we had about things we know about trees on post it notes and added them to the chart.

Then we headed outside to observe some trees.  We learned that observe means to look and that scientists do lots of observing!  We noticed that there are many different types of trees in our school yard.

   

After we observed the trees in our school yard, we decided to take a nature walk down the path between Northview and Eagan High School.  We each got our own ziploc bag with our name on it.  We collected items to put in our bags and bring back to our classroom to use in our research station.  We will observe these items more closely and learn about them in the coming weeks.  It was a beautiful day and we found some amazing artifacts!

   

   

   

   

We are so excited to learn more about trees and to see how real scientists do their jobs!