On Friday afternoon we met our 5th grade book buddies for the first time! The students in Ms. Wales class joined us in our classroom for a fun getting to know you activity. The students LOVED it. We meet with our 5th grade book buddies about once a month for fun reading or craft activities. Sometimes 5th graders will help us with STEAM projects. It is wonderful to see the relationships grow between the kindergarteners and 5th graders!
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Today during science we headed outside to explore the trees in the playground area. We collected leaves, twigs, seeds and bark to start a tree book. We will complete the book next week.
Room 107 had a BLAST today during our Pumpkin Passport Party!This afternoon the students enjoyed working through many pumpkin themed centers during our Pumpkin Passport Party. Your child brought home their passport, which listed all the Pumpkin “places” your child visited in class. The learning goals for each center are listed below. Thank you SO MUCH to our in-class and at-home volunteers who helped to make this passport party a success!
Pumpkin Weaving: While weaving strips of paper, students needed to use fine motor planning. Pumpkin Patch: At this center, students identified and sequenced the life cycle of a pumpkin. Pumpkin Prints: Students used their artistic talents and painted a pumpkin patch using real life pumpkins, orange and white paint on a black background. Pumpkin Musical Chairs: A twist on the classic game of musical chairs. We got to move and work on initial letter sounds. Each chair had a lower case letter that students had to match with a real object. Pumpkin Playdough: While poking, rolling, and squishing play dough, students develop the small muscles in their fingers and hands. They also gain strength and improve dexterity in their hands and fingers, critical areas of development for writing and drawing! Pumpkin Decorating: Students got to exercise their creative muscles while decorating a foam pumpkin with googly eyes and sequins. The most important thing was...we had fun! After our wonderful field trip, we kept the pumpkins in the room for a few days. During this time we did a whole lot of pumpkin math! We had a great time measuring how tall our pumpkins were with cubes, how long around they were with links, comparing how heavy they were using a balance scale and if they would float or sink. The class really enjoyed doing a Minecraft Cosmic Kids Yoga video for indoor recess! Everyone was engaged with the yoga practice! You can find Cosmic Kids Yoga videos on youtube. The week we began our conversation about labels when writing. We first labeled a picture of our classroom stuffy Beekle and then we labeled Ms. Barnett! Students each picked a part of her to label and wrote the beginning sound or word on a post it. We covered her with post its to show how to label. On Friday we drew and labeled in our writing notebooks.
This week we learned a new song all about the parts of an apple. After singing the song a few times the students created their own motions to go along with the words. Today, we also labeled the parts of a apple to go along with our song and added it to our poetry notebooks. Watch us sing the Parts of an Apple Song!
We had such a wonderful time on our field trip today! When we arrived at the farm we started the trip with a hay ride out to the apple fields. On the hay ride students noticed many trees with leaves changing color and different varieties of apples. When we got to the trees we filled our bags with apples, choosing the best ones. If any of your apples have some damage it is due to the hail storms earlier this year. We noticed many apples that had fallen off the trees and lots of bees looking for sugar! On the hay ride back we got to munch on a freshly picked apple. They were delicious! Next, we chose a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. We are keeping the pumpkins in the room to do some pumpkin math over the next few days! Then we had a snack and observed the goats, sheep, chickens, llamas and alpacas at the farm. It was a fantastic day!
Thank you to our chaperones Melissa, Tany and Abbey! Yesterday, Janet Kaplan, a district wide Occupational Therapist, came for the second time to room 107. As per her letter that went home, we worked on pencil grip and learned about working fingers and resting fingers. Students enjoyed making a bead bracelet using their working fingers to string the beads. Yesterday we read the book Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews. Today, we used the Activboard to brainstorm how we could use black dots to create our own images. We used our imagination and came up with some great ideas! We then created our own pages for a room 107 Ten Black Dot book. Today we also started our discussion of Trees in science. Students brainstormed and draw/wrote things they already knew about trees to launch our unit. We created a tree of things we know about trees!
This week we learned all about Whole Body Listening. We read the book Whole Body Listening Larry at School. We learned about how we listen with our eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet, body, brain and heart. To help us consolidate this new information we made our own Listening Larry pictures to bring home.
Room 107 mathematicians are getting into our math workshop routine. We have been working in partners and discovering new math materials as well as playing math games.
Today, during math workshop, Ms. Lepow, a math coach at Claypit Hill, visited our classroom! She brought an incredibly beautiful counting book, Over in the Ocean: In a Coral Reef and read it aloud to the class using the document camera. While we read, pairs of students went up the board with one "finder" and one "counter" to look for all the baby sea life in the book. Room 107 mathematicians did a fantastic job counting, working in partners, and being a good audience!
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