Mrs. Crook's Classroom: Look what's hatching!

Wow! March seemed to slip away from me. Between regular school stuff and my own crazy personal life, I somehow managed to only post once in the whole month of March. Then we had spring break and I should have posted right before that, especially since I got some adorable pictures of class on our Easter egg hunt. So we are back from Spring Break and we are in the last few months of this school year. Over the next little bit we have a lot going on.

Some of you may have heard that we are incubating chicken eggs in our classroom! We have 26 eggs that were graciously donated to us by a local Kelseyville neighbor. The class observed as I put the eggs into the incubator on Thursday, April 12th. You should ask your child how many days it takes for a chicken egg to hatch. (By the way, the answer is 21 days.) Our class should be seeing some hatching around May 4th, but could be really any time in that week. This is a great opportunity for us to talk about life cycles, which is one of our big focuses in kindergarten science. Once the eggs have hatched, we will observe the chicks in our classroom for about 2 weeks. After their first two weeks, I will be sending home chicks with families who have turned in the permission slip (this will be going home probably towards the end of April, so you have some time to think about it). Chickens will be sent to homes in pairs of 2 .... and the class can tell you this is because chickens are very social and don't like to be lonely. This will be done on a lottery basis and it will depend on how many eggs actually hatch. As things progress with the chicken eggs I will definitely let you know. The class is very excited that we have started to incubate our eggs and they are becoming more knowledgeable everyday about what chickens need while in the egg and out of the egg. The biggest thing you will hear them talk about at this point is the temperature. We have some thermometers in the incubator and the class knows the special number is 99! As the incubation period progresses, we will begin to talk about humidity and why it is important to keep the incubator moist on the inside.

One of our main math skills in kindergarten is learning how to work with numbers. This includes adding numbers to make a new number and breaking a larger number apart into two smaller groups. What this translates to is simple addition and simple subtraction. We just finished up our unit on addition and many of the students have found it to be fun to work with and manipulate numbers. Today we played a game using two dice. The students rolled the dice and then wrote each of the numbers shown. Then they wrote a number sentence to match their roll. While working with simple addition we have talked about different ways to solve problems. Some of these strategies are to draw a picture (either on paper or in your mind) of what it looks like, using fingers, counting on, or the favorite strategy when applicable is the "disappearing zero trick." This means if you are adding 10 + 6, that the 0 in 10 disappears and you replace it with the 6 (or the number being added on).

Here, the numbers 4 and 2 were rolled. So the number sentence is 4 + 2 = 6

This afternoon we had some gorgeous spring weather and went outside to take advantage of it. We got out some really fun sensory activities. The bubbles (shown below) were a huge hit...until we ran out of bubble juice. :)

The class also had a chance to play with our rainbow rice that has been in our sensory bin since St. Patrick's Day. :/ This was a great chance to use it one last time and get ready to dump it. We had some extra shaving cream that also needed to be used up, so we had a lovely combination of rainbow rice and shaving cream. It was certainly an interesting texture to feel. There was also just a plain shaving cream bin, and the kids seemed to have a wonderful time!