Spring Robins

On Friday, Ms. Arboe was our guest teacher while Mrs. Kurt completed our Concepts About Print literacy assessment.  Ms. Arboe read us the story "Baby Bird's First Nest" by Frank Asch.  

We made some pretty cute robins, which we have hanging in our classroom to decorate for spring.

   

   

Ladybug Math

Today in Math we made the cutest ladybugs!  We added spots to their wings and then created an addition problem out of the number of spots on each wing.  It was fun and we are getting good at addition problems!

   

   

   

   

Seeds and Taking Care of the Earth

This week, we continue to observe and write about our bean seeds that we have in our classroom.  We are learning about seeds and plants and know that seeds need soil in order to germinate.  However, once your bury a seed in soil, you can't see what happens underground.  We placed a bean seed and a wet cotton ball inside a ziploc bag.  We taped the bags to our classroom window so they could get sunlight.  We check the bags daily and we write about what we observe in our plant journals.  Some of the seeds have not changed much yet, but some are showing lots of changes.  We are seeing some roots, root hairs and even a few sprouts.  It is so exciting to be able to see what would usually be underground.  

   

Obviously, these photos were taken last Friday.  Now there is no snow outside our window!

April 22, 2014 is Earth Day.  We will be learning lots about taking care of the earth and things that even five and six year olds can do to take care of the earth.  We started one of our projects this week.  We worked together with Mrs. Schlagel's class to paint our hand prints to make the world.  Mrs. Schlagel's class added the green handprints, to represent the land, and our class added the blue handprints, to represent the water.  It is hanging in the hallway between both kindergarten rooms.  We will be doing some community writing to explain our promise to the earth and adding this to the display.  Stay tuned!

   

Spring Chicks and Measurement

Even though it hasn't looked much like spring outside, we decided to make a cute spring chick project to make it look more like spring inside!

   

First, we sponge painted pastel colored paints in a pattern on a large piece of construction paper.  We let the paper dry overnight.  The next day, we started by cutting out a cute, yellow chick.

Our next step was to make our rectangular piece of paper into an oval shape by cutting off the corners.  Then we cut a zig zag line right across the center of the oval to make it look like an egg that had cracked open.

   

We glued the yellow chick to the bottom half of the egg and used a paper fastener to connect the top half of the egg to the bottom.

   

   

They turned out so cute and are now hanging in our hallway to brighten our day!

In Math, we are learning about measurement.  On our calendar board for April, we are learning about the different kinds of tools that are used to measure time, weight, temperature and length.  We are also learning about using standard units of measure.  We decided to use the unifix cubes as standard units of measure.  We put them together in groups of ten cubes and then estimated how long we were.  Then we actually measured people to see how close our estimates were.  FUN!

   

Editing and Science Journals

Today we learned even more about editing and revising stories.  We worked with our writing partners to edit a story that Mrs. Kurt wrote.  We each got a copy of her story and a red flair marker.  That was fun using a red marker!  We worked with our partners to edit Mrs. Kurt's writing and we did a great job!

   

   

After that, we took some time to observe our fabric samples from Tuesday after they were dry.  We noticed that some of the stains were removed, but some were not.  We wrote about our observations in our Science Notebooks.

   

Soiling and Washing Fabric

As we continue our unit in Science titled Materials in our World, we took some time to see what would happen to our fabric samples when we soiled them.  Soiled means to make them dirty…boy, did we ever!  We used three things…ketchup, mustard and chocolate syrup.  We each had a sample of fabric and soiled the fabric using these three things and popsicle sticks.  You can't believe how much fun it was to do this part of the activity.

   

   

Then we had a problem…soiled fabric.  How could we get it clean?  First, we tired cleaning it with scrub brushes and plain water.  It did help some, but it did not get all the stains out.  Hmm…now what?

   

We gathered back on the rug and decided we needed to try something else.  We chatted about what our parents might use when they wash fabric, like our clothes, and someone suggested we try using some soap.  Brilliant!

   

This worked much better, especially when it came to removing the ketchup and the chocolate syrup.  We did discover that the mustard stains were a little more stubborn, and even the soap did not help us get them all the way out.  We learned that doing laundry would be hard work!

Revising our Writing

Welcome back from Spring Break!  I was so excited to have all of my friends back at Northview.  There are only 48 days of school left in this year and we have lots to accomplish!

   

This week, in Writing Workshop, we are learning about revising our writing.  We are really getting to be good writers!  We are remembering to begin sentences with upper case letters, put spaces between our words and to use punctuation marks at the end of our sentences.  Even though we are remembering to do all of these things, we still sometimes make mistakes.  We are working with our writing partners to revise our writing.

A good writing partner has two important jobs…to help us be better writers and to take care of our feelings.  We want to be sure we tell our partners in a positive way how they can make their writing even better.  We will be working on this throughout this week.

   

We also started designing our kindergarten plates.  We draw a picture on a round piece of paper and we send the papers to the company in Texas that makes our pictures in to a plate.  We are so excited to get these done and sent so we can get them back!!