Our First Day!

We had a great first day of Kindergarten. Thank you to all the wonderful moms and dads this morning. You were very brave letting your children go! We would like to share this moving article about the first day of Kindergarten. Please read this with a tissue near by!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-simon/to-my-fellow-moms-on-the-first-day-of-kindergarten_b_5693541.html

Open House 2014-2015

The year has FLOWN by! We made it to our fabulous farm unit. Here are some snap shots of all of the amazing projects these hard little workers did.

Our farm mural. Each week we read an informational text on a different animal. We wrote reports on each type of animal and made an animal art project or craft.  When you lift up the cow's belly, you can read all about cows!

This was a fun one! After reading the story "Click Clack Moo", the students wrote to the fictional character Farmer Brown. Each student pretended to be one of the animals from the story and they had to complain to Farmer Brown about why they were dissatisfied with him and what he needed to provide for them. They typed up their letters and created this beautiful art.

To kick off our farm unit, we studied plants and went shopping at "Trader Mates". On each plant the students wrote where the vegetable grows and what part of the vegetable they eat (seed/flower/root etc.)

After learning all about the farm, the students picked their favorite animal and made a cute hand print. They drew a background and then painted it with watercolors. They also wrote a poem about their animal.

Here is a close up of Natalia's piece.  Look at her cute duck!

After reading "Down on the Farm" the students re-created the story by choosing their favorite page to illustrate. They used their knowledge of "quotation marks" to show the sound the animal made.

Our lovely chicken coup! It had a roof, but sadly, it became too heavy and the coup was in danger of falling so we had to take it down!

After reading "The Little Red Hen", we made our own chicken crafts. Inside the chicken, the students wrote down all the facts they learned about chickens.

WIld Tangram facts! After lots of practice with tangrams, the students made their own farm animal tangram. Finn's pig is adorable!

Look at this gorgeous duck!

The students made a beautiful farm landscape with tempura paint and oil pastels.

Where does our food come from? Our students know! On each animal, students wrote the products that the animal provides.

During the week we studied pigs, we read "The Three Little Pigs" of course! The students became the big bad wolf and wrote an apology letter to the pigs!

After writing the wolf's declaration of innocence, the students recorded themselves reading their letter and we turned it into a QR code to scan :)

The Three Little Pig Engineers

We read the story "The Three Little Pigs" today. After reading the story, we discussed the different materials that each pig used to build their house. We had a great conversation about how important it is to be a hard worker and to not be "lazy" like the young pig from the book. I tasked the students with re-creating the story by constructing their own pig house. Each table was assigned to work with a material that matched the story. They had to use their engineering skills to build a strong house that the scary wolf (blow dryer) could not knock down! In order to work as a team, I selected a "Friendship Leader" for each group. This leader was in charge of making sure that all the students worked together, took turns and used kind words. Before any building could commence, they had to begin by studying the materials and discussing their game plan. Once they had a nice, collaborative brainstorming session, the building could begin!

Here is the start of their "stick house".

They worked so hard to make the stick house "just so".

Check out this beautiful "straw house".

Uh oh... here comes the Big Bad Wolf!

Oh no! The wolf huffed and puffed and blew the house down!

The stick house wasn't strong enough to stand up to the Big Bad Wolf either.

Look at the anticipation on their faces :) Lucky for them, the wolf could not knock down their brick house.

Here are a few quotes from the students as I walked around and listen to them discuss their project.

"Listen guys, Do you want the house to blow down? Im trying to build a good house!"

"I think I have an idea. We can twist it like this."

"Oh look at this square. It has straight lines."

"We need windows for our house because if it doesn't have windows then it will be like a big block."

Fox News!

Mates is famous! Check out our school being featured on Fox News.
Fox News Link

We love plants!

We have been learning all about plants and how they grow!

We planted our own Lima beans and we've got a few plants growing strong.

We learned about what plants need to grow and we sequenced the steps.

We learned about the parts of a plant and made these flip books to show what each part of the plant does.

We had special visitors during our plant unit who taught us even more about plants and brought each student their own tomato plant. Thank you Batemans!

We read the story of "Tops and Bottoms" and learned about which vegetables grow on top of the soil and which grow underneath.

This went well with our next activity where the kids got to eat all five parts of a plant! The seeds were the favorite overall.

We started counting by 5's and used nickels to create our own nickel gardens.

Other exciting news! Our butterflies have emerged from their chrysalis. Here we are watching intently while one pushes his way out!

Butterflies

We've had a busy week filled with learning about caterpillars and butterflies! We have our very own caterpillars in Room 2 and we are waiting patiently for them to get ready to build their chrysalis.

Here are a few of this week's activities.

We read the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar and the students made their own caterpillar with the letters in their last names.

We graphed the food that the caterpillar eats in the story and talked about which day he ate the most and how much he ate altogether.

We used our special caterpillar rulers to measure all sorts of things in our classroom including our bodies!

We learned about metamorphosis and made our own version of the life cycle of a butterfly using noodles.

We talked about how butterflies wings have symmetry. The students had to draw the other half of this butterfly and do their best to make the sides symmetrical. This was super tough and they did so great! Then we labeled the parts of the butterfly using the words we've learned during our insects unit.

Wrapping Up Community

Our community map is complete with traffic signs and a railroad track!

Check out our vehicle projects!