Garden For Life

The school at ABS has a wonderful gardening program that let's children help plant and tend to various flowers, herbs and veggies. The gardener welcomed us yesterday to explore the garden and help bake bread in the clay oven he made (with the kids' help). Later in the day we tasted the bread--nothing better than fresh, warm bread right out of the oven. It's a wonderful program that exposes the children to thinking about healthy foods and taking care of the environment.

Bread is made with flour, wheat, millet, barley and sometimes flax seeds. DELISH!

Kneading the bread!

Clay oven

CHIVES!

Frog Pond

Friday was sunny and warm and PERFECT for a walk down the bike path to scope out some real live frogs in their authentic habitats. We have been learning about frogs, their life cycles, and their habitats for the past few weeks. Four Winds did a great presentation on frogs at the beginning of the week where we heard recordings of how various frogs sound.

We did our very best to be quiet at the pond, and the children were very respectful of the nature surrounding us. We saw at least 7 frogs, and we even spotted a submerged turtle through the murky water and leaves. We heard frogs croaking all around us and followed their 'voices' to find them. A few were rather large and a few were quite small. We had a blast, and even got in some great photos...

On our way down the bike path to the frog pond.

Gorgeous day for a kindergarten adventure!

Best friends!

Flowers along the way.

A frog has amazing camouflage! 

Psyched to be out in the fresh air!

Look! Another frog!!

We had to be super quiet so that we wouldn't scare our frog friends away. 

On the lookout for frogs and turtles...

Shhhh!

Looking and listening for frogs... 

Can you see the frog?

How about the turtle?

This guy posed for us so we could get an up close picture!

This frog blends in with brown sticks AND green leaves!

We could hear this guy ribbiting, so we followed the sound...and there he is!

This is the shot of the day! This frog was about the size of my hand. SO COOL!

More on Fairy Tales

Our fairy tale unit has come to an end. You can revisit the original post here:

                     http://musingsofateacher-beth.blogspot.com/2011/05/fairy-tales.html

I have to confess that this is one of my favorite units to teach!! I love fairy tales, the children aways get really into fairy tales and are always so entertained by various versions of one story. There are endless ways to engage children because there is something for everyone in fairy tale stories: beautiful princesses, heros, bad guys, magic, humor!

Before we bid adieu to fairy tales, I want to show off some of the creative work the students completed in the last few days of our unit:

In order to reinforce the characteristics in a fairy tale, children completed this activity. After a fairy tale read-aloud, children checked off which elements the story had and then wrote a sentence about what they thought the most important part of the story was.

The children LOVED the story of the Three Little Pigs (and we read several versions)! To get their creative juices flowing, I prompted them to write about the house they would build if they were one of the Little Pigs. Some went with the brick house, some made up their own ideas entirely!

The culmination of our fairy tale unit involved children writing their very own fairy tale. They had so much fun with this! I scaffolded the activity by providing a template for them to follow. See the examples below:

"The Prince and the Princess"

"Once upon a time, there was a princess, prince and a hourse that was a villain and he had a magic potion. And the hourse put a spell, and the horse put his finger out and the horse walked ove the the prince."

"There was a problem because the princess saw that the prince was on the ground."

"So to solve the problem, the Fairy Godmother came over to save the prince with her potion magic because it woke the prince up from the magic spell."

"And they all lived happily ever after!"

"Once upon a time there was a princess and she had a baby. Her baby girl grew up."

"There was a problem because a mean witch got a spell on the princess"

"So to solve the problem a prince kissed the girl."

Investigating Number Sentences

Recently in math, we have been investigating number sentences in relation to ten-frames.

The skills involved in this activity include:

* understanding addition and subtraction

* exploring standard notation for addition and subtraction

* exploring how abstract symbols can be used to represent pictures

Here, children are asked to find the connection between the sentence, 3+4=7, and the picture above. There are three other number sentences that can be connected to this picture.

During this session, children are asked to investigate which number sentence does NOT belong; and also to explain how the other number sentences to belong. I love hearing children describe how the number sentences correlate to the arrangement of frogs in the ten-frame :)

Parts of a Flower

This was a fun science based craft we completed to depict the parts of a flower. We discussed the function that each parts plays to help a flower live and grow!

What Makes a Teacher's Day?

When a student loves what he has learned in school SO MUCH that he does that kind of work at home!


Remember all those diagrams with labels that we worked on a few weeks ago? Ethan grasped the idea really quickly and loved learning the names of parts of animals, different tools and machines, etc. He came in this morning with his sketch book and said (with a huge smile) "Mrs. Adams I LOVE DIAGRAMS!!! Look..."

Diagram of a Jet

Diagram of a Race Car

I know that I've done my job (and done it well) when children get excited by what they have learned from me, and take the new skills with them outside the classroom. Thank you, Ethan, for making my day!

Picture Problems

This is our second go 'round with picture problems. It is amazing to me that kindergarten students are learning word problems, I don't think that I was introduced to this kind of math work until well into elementary school (which is probably why I struggled with this bit of math!)

Children were asked to sketch how they solved the problem then they were invited to share their thinking and explain how they reached the answer.

The skills involved in doing picture problems include:

* interpreting visual information

* counting quantities to 10

* reading and writing numerals to 10

* exploring basic operations

* learning to represent thinking with pictures and/or numbers

* sharing strategies and solutions with peers

Picture Problem 1

Sketch #1

Sketch #2

Picture Problem 2

One sketch

Picture problem 3

Ethan knows his 'math fact's, and "just knew" that the combination of 3 and 3 makes 6,  or if there are 6 altogether and 3 are shown, then you need 3 more to make six! Wowza!

It is SO interesting to observe how different children think about math, and how they take different avenues to solve these problems!