Peep! Peep!

If you haven't heard by now, our class has some baby chicks that hatched.  We have a total of 6 chicks in our classroom!  It is very exciting.  Probably some time this next week I will be sending home permission slips for our lottery draw.  We didn't have quite as many hatch as I was hoping, so it looks like we will have three families that will get picked to have 2 chicks each.

With our egg hatching life cycle study, we have been doing a lot of learning about chickens and what they need in life.  The students have been keeping a journal of observations and questions that have come up since the eggs were incubating in the room up to now where we have our baby chicks.

It has been a while since I have had time to post so I will do a quick picture catch-up so that you can see how we celebrated earth day at school.  All of the students in kindergarten made an earth day hat.  We also made a quick and easy paper kite for our kite flying festival part of our Earth Day Celebration.  The recycled art projects that came in were great and very creative!

Recycled Art Lamp

Recycled Art robot

Recycling Assembly presented by Ms. Parker's 5th Grade Class

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

During our Jobs and Choices time we have had a couple of new Choices introduced and the class has had a great time with them.  We have a couple of LED Lite Brites now and it is very exciting to see the kids spell their names in the light bulbs and make pictures.  

We have also experienced cloud dough (named so because of how soft it is), lacing cards, board games, and perler beads.  It is always fun for me to bring in a new sensory item to the class.  Some of the sensory items are a huge hit with everyone, while others are only exciting for some of the students.  The lacing cards are a great practice for fine motor skills and the class really liked to "sew."  I got a couple of board games for the class, including "Candy Land" and "Cootie."  This has been such a great way to help with turn-taking, rule-following, and cooperativeness in our classroom.  Another fine motor activity has been the perler beads where the students put the beads onto the templates in order to create different designs... these are definitely tricky for little hands and big hands alike!

Fun with Pattern Block Shapes!

Playing Candy Land!

We finished our P.E. unit of T-Ball and did a final game with Ms. Brown's class to put our practiced skills to the test.  Now we will be starting relay races and games for the month of May.

in-field

out-field

We also have finished our unit in math on basic subtraction.  We have talked about how subtraction means to take-away.  One of our favorite learning videos for this subject is here:

Here the class has taken sticks of 10 cubes and broken them into two groups.  The class discovered that there are many ways to take 10 apart!

Telling a subtraction story! 10 - 2 = ?

With the end of the month we also had an Awesome Attendance and Character Trait Assembly!  We had two students from our class that were very successful with last month's character trait of perseverance.  Congratulations for always trying and never giving up!

 

Our other focus over the last 2 weeks has been SIGHT WORDS!  We have been doing Sight Word Boot Camp for 2 weeks now and the class seems to be enjoying it.  Because all students learn at different levels, we have 4 groups in our class for boot camp (Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue).  On Monday mornings students are quizzed on their 6 sight words that they were working on during the previous week and are given a new set of 6 words to practice and focus on during the current week.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays we do some major focus groups with those four color sets and the students rotate between playing a sight word game with me, making one of our letter craft project,s working on our Lexia computer software, and doing an independent sight word activity.  We have been making progress with our sight words and this gives each group of students a chance to work on the words that are right for them at the time.  Each Monday your student will bring home their words they worked on for the previous week so that they can continue working on them at home, as well.  Wednesdays we do a whole group activity involving our sight words and on Fridays we review and tell our words to a partner.  I am loving this time to focus on sight words and getting the students more prepared to be consistent readers!  Check your child's folder for their sight words from this week on Monday!

                                                         

The School Science Fair is coming up and will be held on the same evening as Open House, May 24th.  Students can submit a project for the science fair, if they would like to.  This is NOT mandatory.  Families are encouraged to help their students with any projects.  Science projects can be: displays, experiments, models, and focus on any of the following areas: Earth Science, Physical Science, Space, Biology, or Chemistry.  If your child would like to do a project, now is the time to be thinking of what the project will be and how much time it will take to complete.  All participants will receive a ribbon for submitting a project.

Some great ideas can be found on these websites:

www.freesciencefairprojects.com

Take a quiz here with your child to see which project fits them best!

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sciencefaircentral/

Guide for parents on helping students create Science Fair Projects with links to other resources.

HAVE A GREAT, SUNNY WEEKEND!

Also, if you are looking for a way to help out our classroom, I have a proposal up on donorschoose for some other seating options in our classroom.  Spread the word and share the link!

Help us out if you can and spread the word!

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!

I hope you have a great weekend and I will keep you updated on our baby chicks!

Earth Day Event - On Friday, April 20th, the whole school will participate in an Earth Day Celebration.  A paper went home today about submitting a recycled art project as part of this celebration.  This is not a mandatory project, but is an option for a fun family activity that would be put on display.  Projects need to be turned in by Thursday, April 19th in order to be displayed.  Projects will go home on Friday, April 20th.  Here are just a few ideas, but I would love to see what you and your child can come up with, too.