A week of Special Events!

Between Valentine's Day celebrations and the KES Talent Show, we had a very fun-filled week.  On Tuesday, for Valentine's Day, we had a fun little class party.  We also were able to see the kindergarten classes perform their Valentine songs in the morning.  Tuesday was a very fun day and you could definitely feel the love in the classroom.

Passing out Valentine Cards

All of the yummy treats we had at our class party

Getting our Valentine bags ready

On Wednesday afternoon the class was able to see the first dress rehearsal of the KES Talent Show.  There were about 15 different acts that consisted of singing, dancing, gymnastics, and Poi.  The class loved the show and was very impressed with their fellow students.  Many of the students are looking forward to the evening performance of our Talent Show that will be held this coming Wednesday night (Feb. 22nd) at 6:30 pm.

This week we also had one of the school nurses come in and give us a lesson about hand washing.  The school nurses are holding a hand washing campaign in order to help combat some of the germs and illnesses that are continually spread throughout the classroom.  The class had a chance to use a black light and see the germs that were on their hands.  So immediately afterwards, we did some good hand washing practice.  We love that the nurses are so dedicated to our students at KES.

In our classroom, we have also been improving our technology skills.  This week students had opportunities to use our newest program EasyTech through learning.com, as well as continuing our typing skills on typing.com.
This last week was definitely not a typical week in our classroom, but we certainly had fun this last week.  With today (Monday) being a holiday, this next week may not be completely back to normal but it will be closer.  I hope everyone is enjoying the three-day weekend, despite all of the rain!

Data, Graphing, and Science Investigations

I will start by apologizing for not getting a post up last week.  The end of the week hit and I somehow ran out of time, so I told myself I would do it Sunday evening and then that didn't happen either.  So this post, hopefully shouldn't be too long, but will cover the last two weeks in the classroom.
We finished up our Graphing and Data unit in math.  For our culminating project the students created group graphs based on their own surveys.  We had many that asked about favorite movies and we also had a couple groups that asked about other favorites.  The process involved the students creating a survey and then asking that survey among each of the class members and collecting the data.  Then as a group they created a bar graph to represent their data.  The students worked very hard on these and it was quite exciting to see the results.

Surveying the class

The finished products --- all 6 bar graphs

In science, we finished off the investigations involving erosion.  The students were given a tower of sand and they had to create a device to prevent water AND wind erosion.  Each group did not have much to work with.... one piece of string, some foil, one coffee filter, a piece of mesh cloth, 4 large popsicle sticks, and 2 small popsicle sticks.  

After the structures were built, each group was given an eye dropper with water to be the "rain," and each student was given a plastic straw to be the "wind."  Once all of the "erosion" was complete, we removed the structures and the students made observations in their science notebooks about how much of a change occurred between the two types of erosion to their sand tower.

For this current week I don't have near as many pictures as I thought, but we did quite a bit in the classroom this week.  Our new unit in math is focusing on numbers to 1,000 and we have been writing these numbers in expanded notation, word form, and representing them using blocks, sticks, and cubes.  The students have also been working on projects in our Google CS-First curriculum.  We were able to complete activity 3 today using the scratch.mit.edu platform.  It is incredible to think that February is almost half-way done.  The coming weeks we will be doing a lot in the classroom.  

As a side note, a permission slip was sent home this week for our walking field trip to the Kelseyville Post Office.  These permission slips are due on Feb. 23rd.  Also the trip itself is on Thursday, March 9th, which is a minimum day.  The permission slip says we will arrive back at the school at 1pm, but that is not correct.  We will be back to the school by 12pm, so that students will still be dismissed at 12:20.  A note is going home about this on Monday.  So sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Have a wonderful weekend!