Graduation!

 Memory verses above, watching the slide show below

 Plant song

 Penguin Dance!!!

 The official stuff

 Just plain cute

 We're done!  Time for a party :)

All pictures courtesy of Tom Bakker

What a great day!

We started the day with chapel.  Then we went to the church to practice for graduation.  Our practice went quite well today.  Afterwards, Ms. VP took us out for ice cream!

 Then it was water day: water balloons, pools, slip n' slide, bubbles, otter pops.

 

 

What a wonderful (and delicious) day.
Come to the church tomorrow for some live cuteness!

Whales, blends, drawing

 Measuring the lengths of some whales (above)
Later we looked for beginning blends in the morning message

 and made lots of words with blends (some real, some not)

 In drawing club we drew bushbabies, which I had to look up because people started asking questions: where do they live?  What do they eat? 

Party with our Buddies!

So simple.  So fun.
Game 1: drop clothespins in a jar.  You would not believe how loud and exciting this got...

 Game 2: Oops - not fast enough with the camera

 Game 2: carry cotton balls on a spoon to another bowl.  (Math connection - we made each team group their cotton balls by 5s and then count to see how many they got)

 Activity 3: ICE CREAM!

Quote

"Some Grandmas and Grandpas don't have very good hear-sight"

Water Cycle Game!

Here is a short clip that shows the organized chaos from this afternoon.  They did a pretty good job moving from area to the next independently.  And another clip below:

 

The water cycle game (still life version for those of you who cannot view the video).  Here's how it works.  This drop of water (child) is in the glacier, so she grabbed a glacier bead, then rolled the die.  It looks like she is going to ground water, so she'll mark an arrow on her paper from glacier to ground water, and then move over to the ground water...

Every "water drop's" path was different.  It's pretty amazing how intricate and varied the water cycle can be.  Did the children understand exactly how water moves from one part to another?  No.  This activity was originally designed for an older grade, but Kindergarteners still can enjoy it and learn some things - like where water is, that it moves, that there is more water in the ocean than in plants (several children got 'stuck' in the ocean for quite a while).

You know an activity is successful when seven children opt to continue the water cycle game rather than go to free choice centers.  Or maybe they just really wanted to keep going until they got to the glacier with the shiny beads :)  So did they come home and tell you all about it?

h brothers

When children finished work, they got to play this game again.  It's h brothers swat.  Someone says a sound (or a word with the sound), and two others race to swat it first.

h brothers sharing.  th - things, wh - white dress, ph - (nothing), ch - chicken, chapstick, chalk, chiles, Cheesy, sh - shark, shoe box, shirt, shampoo, shark, shoes

 Playing with seashells

Thank you!

Thank you, parents, for placing Scholastic orders online!  Every time someone does, I get a $3 book coupon to use for the class.  Look what came in the mail yesterday!  All the books in the picture above were free, compliments of you ordering books (near the beginning of the year).  THANK YOU!  Below are more new books for our classroom, some of which were purchased with bonus points, another perk for our classroom, so thank you for using Scholastic.  New books are always so exciting!

I don't understand why, when these were both oriented the same way, blogger rotated one of them. 

Daily Dose of Awesome

We made rainbow fruit kabobs today.  They had a lot of fun doing this and are excited to share them with you tomorrow!

Want to know what they are looking at?  What made them SHRIEK and laugh hysterically for several minutes (don't worry - I warned the preschool teacher next door ahead of time)?
Raisins.  Yesterday we talked about sinking/floating.  Today we continued it.  We predicted if raisins would sink or float in water.  Then we dumped out the water and tried Sprite.  Ask your child what happened...  Or you can watch the video clip later, which was several minutes in, when the room had quieted down quite a bit.  Science is so fun!

We recorded some observations for our science notebooks.  I did not take pictures of their writing, but here are some of the things they wrote:

In Sprit razins go up and buwn (In Sprite raisins go up and down)

are rasins moovd (Our raisins moved)

Watr. The razn sunk. Sprit. it flotid and Then Suk and flotid and Suk.

dasTin Srit (danced in Sprite) 

And my personal favorite because of the very scientific observation at the end:

  It floted asikt. floted and sikt! it was crase. (It floated and sinked.  Floated and sinked!  It was crazy.)

Near the end of science, some children started saying they wanted to try it at home with orange juice, lemonade, milk... it is wonderful to hear their excitement to learn more.  Did any of you experiment?

A-E-I-O-U

It is vowel week!
For sharing we saw: alligator, apron, angry bird, animal, airplane, egg, Extra, Iowa bag, Iggy, orange toy, On the Seesaw book, and an undershirt.

We've also had lots of fun singing the apples and bananas song...

I like to ate, ate, ate, Aepples and ba-nay-nays
I like to eat, eat, eat, eapples and ba-nee-nees
I like to ite, ite, ite, iepples and ba-nie-nies
I like to oat, oat, oat, oepples and ba-no-nos.
... and on it goes.  Great fun way to practice differentiating those tricky vowels sounds.