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.

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.

                          

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

                 

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

    

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.

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

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

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!

  

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!

Happy Spring!

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.

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

          

Dinosaur Glyphs

 

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!

 

 

 

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!

 

Making our fossils!

 

 

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!

 

 

 

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!

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!