Spring Thaw

The igloo had 'melted' to this state:
So we did this:



And this:
By lunch time, all that was left, was a pile of squished and bagged milk jugs and a bent-up cardboard base.

Eagle eggs

http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles
Click the above link to see a live stream of eagle eggs. They should be hatching in the next few days. How nice of them to hatch when we are learning about Ee, eggs, and Spring things like birds!

(Thanks to my Iowan aunt/second mom/fellow teacher for passing on the link)

Hooray!

Hooray for new toys! Yesterday I introduced a 'new' toy to the class: Wedgits. I got them at Goodwill on half price day. They are fun stacking toys and everyone enjoyed them. There is a regular set and a translucent set, so that is about $50 worth of toy purchased for $2. Hooray!

Writing about Ee elicited this conversation between students :)

"I got an eggplant the day before my birthday. It hurt.”
“What’s an eggplant?”
"It's a fruit.”
“No, it’s when you hit your head on the concrete.”

Egg-celent Egg-speriment

The egg-speriment: How strong is an egg?
We put an egg in a little nest of playdoh (so it wouldn't roll away) and balanced a pan on the egg and a few blocks. First we guessed how many books it would hold. Most guesses were between 1 and 5.
Then we started stacking and counting. This is 20 books. It actually held 25 (hardcover) books before it cracked.
Sometimes science gets a little messy, but it is worth the excitement. :)
We didn't get into the physics of why eggs are so strong, but we marveled at it and wondered if God made eggs so strong to protect baby animals that might be growing inside.


P.S. This is the 100th post!

The day in pictures

The crops we made yesterday are up on the bulletin board. They were excited to see their work.
During reading time, we did some fun/different things. After everyone caught on of the sight words I threw in the air, we got into alphabetical order.
The Spring thaw continues. This picture is taken through the igloo's 'back door'. I predict the igloo to only last another week or two.
Your child's cat in the hat drawing came home today. As a point of reference, here is the poster they were looking at when they drew it. It's really interesting to see the different levels of visual perception. Most children see a face and draw a circle, but 1 or 2 noticed the shape of the face and tried to replicate it. Others have a difficult time separating what they see from what they know (they know a cat has legs, so they draw legs even though the picture has none).
Our buddies came and we had fun with eggs: estimating the circumference of an ostrich egg, measuring area, weighing... Decorating was optional:

Centers:while some children decorated eggs, others played farm
Several children worked together to build a wall.
Happy weekend!

First Day Back

We had a good first day back. Everyone seemed to transition back into school mode with relative ease. I was grateful the rain held off until most of first recess was over. We did end up with one indoor recess, but we fared fine. Some children got artistic,
and we also pulled out the Super Fort, which was a rocket today. Despite the amount of space it takes up, it is really nice to have a fun, big toy to pull out occasionally.
Later the rocket was transformed into a bunch of connected rockets with astronauts. At least, that's what I think it was. At any rate, they were working together and preparing to blast off.
One more thing: I just graded all the work we did today and the class as a whole is doing a fantastic job writing! I love to see the transformation from little/no writing at the beginning of the year to full sentences that are mostly decipherable. There were spaces, punctuation, and all sorts of wonderful work that was done largely independently!

Getting in a creative groove

Playing/building a farm
Building with Magnetix
Our big cow collage. They worked so well together on this and were quite enthusiastic, which is encouraging to see.
Building a log cabin out of pretzels
Making up puppet shows. Parts of it even rhymed or were sung.
Some children decided to be judges for the puppet show. They came with clipboards and notepads and wrote their critiques, such as "I like".

Pictures from Wednesday

Wednesday was Opposite Day and the day we visited the 5th Grade's Wax Museum. They did a great job. The children were especially excited to meet Abraham Lincoln, since we had learned about him recently.

This is the only picture I took of opposite day. Pictured here: an inside-out, backwards shirt, with a tie on the back, one pant leg up and one down, and a dark sock and a light sock in 2 different shoes. We had fun. :)
The igloo is slowly melting. This child is reading in the back doorway.

Writing/Spelling/Reading

It was fun to have t-shirt day Friday. Someone asked "What does your shirt say?" Of course, I did not tell them, but encouraged them to read it. And they could read Be an example. (Though the last word was a challenge). Then someone noticed that Be was spelled wrong. "It's supposed to have two E's," he said. So we talked about how bee and be were different. Then we read other people's shirts. It was a fun five minutes of literacy at the start of the day.

The conversation reminded me of a blog post about spelling from another Kindergarten teacher (you can read it here) that I have been meaning to share. I tried to put quotation marks around the parts that are direct quotes, but some is modified.


"Please, please, please don't do too much correcting of spelling at this point. Children are likely to spell according to the system they've been taught, overgeneralizing the information we've taught."

They might spell school "skool" (unless they look at it on their shirt's logo), use "yous" or "yooz", works "werx", etc. These misspellings really show growth and understanding of letters and sounds. "If you correct sensible misspellings you do a great disservice to your child because you fail to appreciate the risk they have taken to communicate with you in writing. The most likely result of your corrections is to discourage your child into not trying anymore with the result that they will be an even poorer speller in years to come."

"Celebrate your child's earliest writing, and do your best to figure it out." It's okay to ask them to read it to you. :)

"By all means, if THEY ASK you to correct their spelling, go ahead."


So if you're ever wondering why I don't correct all their spelling, now you know.
That being said, I love the notes your children write to me. :) Thank you for the birthday cards and thank you for encouraging reading and writing at home!

Happy birthday to me, Thank you to YOU

Thank you for invading the classroom and surprising me with a fun, delicious party. We had fun!

Dr. Seuss Day

Sorry, no pictures of oobleck. Suffice it to say it was the nosiest, messiest, center.
We made these cute cats in hats for art. Earlier we made the hats (with rhyming words on them :)


For a special snack we had green 'eggs'. First we predicted whether or not we would like them. Then we tried them. Almost everybody liked them (including Ms. VP).
Look how many Dr. Seuss books we have read already! (Not all on Dr. Seuss Day). Every year the children enjoy Dr. Seuss' books, but I don't think I've had this enthusiastic of a class before.

Big Wheels

Mr. Danzeisen brought his truck to school Wednesday (mostly for the preschool class, but he graciously allowed us to come out, ask questions, express our wonder at its hugeness, climb through it, and wave to ourselves in the shiny wheels)

Gym Progress

This week we got to watch an air conditioning unit go up onto the gym roof. A really tall crane came and started to lift the unit as children oohed and ahhed.

Many children found comfortable perches from which to watch
The higher the better!
We only watched one of the units go up, because the exciting part was seeing it being lifted, and the finesse of getting it in exactly the right spot took too long, so interest began to wane and we returned indoors.

Oobleck

Is it wet or is it dry? Is it hard or is it soft? Is it a solid or a liquid?
We had fun exploring oobleck yesterday as part of our celebration of Dr. Seuss' birthday.
If you want to make it at home, it's about 1 cup of water mixed with 1 cup of cornstarch. We added green food coloring to match the book we read (Bartholomew and the Oobleck), but you can use any color. It's fun and messy, but easy to clean up.

Off to a good start!

In February we had only 3 days when everyone was at school (on time and all day). March is off to a much better start. We're one for one so far! We're hoping to stay a little more germ-free this month. :)