Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Spring is here!

We have been enjoying the beautiful weather outside at recess the past couple weeks! It was the perfect time to jump into a unit about spring! We talked a lot about the things we start to hear, smell and see as our winter season turns into spring. We made group posters and our own mini books on this topic.  We also talked a lot about rain and weather.  Our first spring activity was to make an umbrella person. There is a cute poem that goes along with it to tell you why you cannot see the umbrella person’s face.

     umbrella person                      umbrella person 2

We also talked a lot about rain and why it is important. First we had a survey asking whether or not we liked rain.

                  rain graph

We sponge painted a rain drop and then wrote four important facts about rain. They are writing complete sentences all by themselves!

rain drop   rain drop 2  rain drop leila

Of course, we had to talk about where rain comes from! CLOUDS! We read the book Little Cloud by Eric Carle and created our own clouds using shaving cream and glue. Then we wrote about what our cloud looked like.

cloud writing

Sometimes it looks like a flower, but it is actually a cloud in the sky.

cloud writing 2

Sometimes it looks like a Santa Claus, but it is just a cloud in the sky.

cloud writing 3

Sometimes it looks like a dirt bike, but it is just a cloud in the sky.

Another fun thing about spring is that we get to be outside and sometimes fly kites! We turned this into a math activity and made a design on our kite that was SYMMETRICAL! They first made their design using shape blocks, then used paper shapes to glue onto their kite. They turned out awesome!

kitekites   symmetry kites

The last thing we talked about was what trees look like during the spring. The buds start to come out and they look like tiny flowers! We dipped the ends of our pencils into pink paint to make groups of 5 blossoms on our trees. We have been working on counting by 5’s so it was FUN and GREAT PRACTICE!

cherry blossom by 5's

Happy Spring!

Smile

Monday, March 19, 2012

Dinosaurs

Wow! Thursday we finished our three week unit on dinosaurs! We learned SO MUCH! We focused on learning the characteristics of the Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops and T-Rex.  The students did a number of writings and drawings on each dinosaur as well as some fun projects! Here are some pictures of everything we did:

Brachiosaurus Report. We wrote down facts about the brachiosaurus and drew a detailed picture of what it looked like. The kids loooovvveeeddd pretending they were scientists with their clipboards researching the brachiosaurus.

Brachiosaurus report

brachiosaurus report 2

Here are our triceratops projects. We followed directions to put the triceratops together and then wrote down facts about him.

tri report 3     tri report 4      triceratops report

Dinosaur Glyphs

triceratops making dinos 2

ava triceratopsmaking dinos

Roll-A-Dino. The kids got into partners and used the dice to roll and add. Whatever number their sum was is the number the colored. GREAT math practice for them and it was a lot of FUN!

Roll A Dino  Roll A Dino 2

Roll a Dino 3 Roll A Dino 4

Roll A Dino 5 Roll A Dino 6

Charles came to visit and talked to us about fossils. He showed us many types of fossils that had been found and even made the kids guess what some of them where! Then we got to make our own fossils!

Charles Charles 2

Making our fossils!

fossils 3  making fossils

making fossils 3  making fossils 4

This morning we were paleontologist and we uncovered the play-doh from our fossils!

The last thing we did was make an environment for our favorite dinosaur to live. We had to think of a heat source, a food source and a water source.  The first step involved planning it out on paper.  The next step was painting our diorama blue for the sky and brown for the ground. After that dried, we were finally able to add the details to our diorama. The kids did a great job of making it look real and including all of the things their dinosaur needed to survive!

dioramas making dioramas

dioramas 5 dioramas 1

dioramas 2 dioramas 4

We had such a fun time learning about dinosaurs! This week we are learning about Spring and rain! Lots of fun pictures to come!

Have a great week!

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Math Websites

Parents! These are two GREAT websites that cover ALL of the skills we practice in kindergarten. If your child is bored and looking for something to do, send them here!!!

http://www.ixl.com/math/kindergarten

http://pbskids.org/stemchallenge/media/stem-challenge-math-framework.pdf

ENJOY!