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.

         (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. 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!

  

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! The kids worked together in different groups to create lots of different animals in the coral reef.

        

  Working on creating Sea Squirts                              Making the Feather Star

             

  Hard at work making Sponges                                 Adding lots of detail!

                                          Anddddddd…..the finished product!

I love how it turned out  

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.

 

 

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!

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!

          

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!

 

 

                               

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

                                                       

                                                    

Grasslands

Last week we talked about grasslands!

Charles came in and talked to us all about what we would find there and why they are important. He also showed us some really neat animal furs and a LIVE SNAKE!

Charles had lots of grassland grass for us to weave through paper to make our own craft. It was hard to get started but they got the hang of it!

                  

Our final project was making a big grasslands picture. We talked a lot about sunflowers during the week as well as animals and plants found n the grasslands. The students put it all together into one big poster and they turned out beautiful!

 

 

Use this fun video to see if your child can say the sight words!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-UlyFDIh_A&feature=youtu.be

Easter Activities

Today we devoted our day to everything Easter!! We started the morning by reading the book Rechenka’s Eggs by Patricia Polacco. Based off the story, the students did a writer’s workshop writing about what they would leave in an egg for someone to find that would make them feel special.  Then we read Jan Brett’s The Easter Egg and designed and painted an Easter egg of our own!

Here we are designing it with crayons…

 

And now our paints….

 

In the afternoon we read The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Then we colored our own rabbits and added carrots. We made our picture into a math problem by counting the carrots we put onto each side of our rabbit and adding them all together!

3 + 3 = 6

And finally, we had an Easter egg hunt in our classroom! The students were able to find two eggs and take them back to their seat and start sorting them by color. After they sorted we graphed how many we had and made all sorts of patterns! After all their hard work they finally got to eat them

 

 

 

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you have a wonderful break. See you next week!

Rockin’ Rainforest

Our rainforest unit was so interesting! We learned about the four layers of the rainforest and what kinds of things we would find in each layer. 

 

The kids also made their own trees and added the details they would find in the rainforest.

 

          

They students did a LOT of writing about the rainforest. One of our writings was about our favorite animal in the rainforest. Another one was about all of the things we would see in the rainforest if we were there. The kids are continuing to do a great job writing full sentences and getting their thoughts down in their writing!

We took a day to make animals of the rainforest and put them all together in a rainforest mural! We had to make sure to put the animals in the correct layers in which they lived.