Saturday, May 19, 2012

In the Ocean

We finished our ocean unit last week and it was a fun one! We studied a lot of ocean life including the coral reef.

We started our unit by reading this story

 

It introduced us to a lot of animals that live in the ocean. We made a huge squid and then wrote about which ocean animal it was bigger than! Such a fun project to get us started.

squids 4  squid 2    squids   squid 3(My squid is bigger than a shark.)                                                       (My squid is bigger than a turtle.)

We spent a day talking about different fish in the Ocean. Thank you, Finding Nemo, for giving the students lots of prior knowledge on this subject. Smile We read a series of The Rainbow Fish and wrote about what we would do if we were the Rainbow Fish. Then we made our own!

rainbow fish   rainbow fish 2

The Coral Reef was our next topic and it was a fun one! We studied all different types of animals in the Coral Reef and watched a Magic School Bus movie about it too. We learned that a lot of the animals in the Coral Reef work together as partners to stay alive. What better to reinforce this concept than to work in partners on our project! Smile The kids worked together in different groups to create lots of different animals in the coral reef.

ocean         ocean 2

  Working on creating Sea Squirts                              Making the Feather Star

ocean 3              ocean 4

  Hard at work making Sponges                                 Adding lots of detail!

ocean 5

                                          Anddddddd…..the finished product!

coral reef

I love how it turned out Smile 

I missed taking photos of our shark facts and coral reef fan book, but I hope your child showed you and told you all they knew!

Here are some pictures of the kelp we made and the whales we labeled. We finished our unit by making big ocean pictures that should have come home yesterday.

kelp  kelp 3

whale  whale 2

One week left of school. Oh. My. Goodness. Can’t believe how fast it has gone. I am not ready to say goodbye.

Pictures to come of our last days together!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Catching Up

It’s been awhile since I have let you know what’s going on in our room! I can’t believe it is already May and we only have 3 short weeks left of Kindergarten! I know the kids are excited to be done and ready to enjoy summer! I, on the other hand, am hoping these next couple of weeks go very slowly. I am not ready to say goodbye to these sweet kindergarteners.

In the past couple weeks we have talked about our Earth and what we need to do to keep it clean and healthy! We made our own earth people to remind us what we can do to take care of the earth. I really love the way they turned out!

      Earth Person     Earth Person 2

We also planted grass, picked up garbage around our school and wrote about ways we can keep help the earth like riding our bike to school, using less water, throwing away our garbage, recycling and re-using things! It was a fun week and we learned a lot about being good caretakers of the earth.

The kids have been working hard on reading independently and also reading with a buddy! They love sharing their books with their friends and every single person in our class is reading! It is so wonderful to listen to them! Here are some pictures of them doing a great job!

ava abi read  landon charlotte read

seth dillen read simon davin read

                                syd mady read

Here are some pictures of the kids having fun at center time Smile 

ava trin

                                                        char-dillen

charlotte dominoes

                                                     davin landon

vivyann madysoon