3/23/10 – 3/25/10

Tuesday, 3/23/10

Today we became astronauts. Our small class of 7 began our day drawing what we might see in the day time sky and the night time sky. Ms. Chrissie had found us some really neat paper and very special crayons. The same crayon colored two different shades depending on which paper you used. And then the children used my white board as a resource where I had written “Day” and “Night” to label their own papers. I loved the independence displayed by the children when asked to complete this task. :) This week we are exploring the stars in the sky and the moon. I wanted the children to start thinking about what they might see in the night time sky from their own back yards. And of course contrast what that might look like in the day.

Then it was off to MM where read Stars. This book confirmed for us that our Sun is a Star. We also learned that not all stars are yellow. Some shine blue and some shine red. We were all surprised to learn that stars shining blue are the hottest and stars shining red are cooler. Because of the colors we would have assumed the opposite. Especially since our beautiful blue planet Neptune is cold. Our star the sun is right in the middle of those two temperatures so it shines yellow.

Then we were off to create our astronaut space helmets. This was met with much enthusiasm. Every one spent a lot of time decorating their helmets. Using space stencils, stickers and foam space stickers. They turned out very cool and were a perfect addition to the rocket packs each child received. I had put them together before class and the kids helped with the tissue paper flames that would shoot out the bottom.

In the afternoon we put on our space gear and were ready to blast off our stomp rocket in the gym. It is the simple things in life that are the most fun. A simple toy that you jump on and as a results sends a foam rocket flying into the air is great fun. It was a contest to see just how high our rockets could fly. Stone and Harrison's flew the highest when they touched the very top of our gym ceiling.

Wow!!! 4...3...2...1...BLAST OFF!

And we can not forget how gorgeous our weather was today. We had a wonderful time playing outside on the playground and our day ended with a birthday party and doughnuts for Harrison. :)

Wednesday, 3/24/10 (Ms. Chrissie's Corner)

We had a blast on Wednesday rolling around the galaxy learning about constellations (a 4 clap word! - we sounded out each syllable with a clap) and then creating our own galaxy art project with constellations of our own!

At morning meeting, we read the book "I am a Star" which took us on an illustrative journey through the images one would see through a telescope and taught us about astronomy. Those students knew that people who are especially interested in this month's curriculum in the planets and solar system might someday want to go to college to study to become astronomers or astronauts. This conversation took an interesting veer off to discuss the fact many daddies and mommies went to college and some of them met each other there. As stories began developing, I quickly got the class back on our correct orbit! :) We discovered that the North Star never moves from its position in the sky, and sailors use it to help navigate, and that it also has another name "Polaris".

Our big project of the day was to make our own constellations. We dunked marbles into glitter paint and put them into a big tin can with a piece of black paper. After alot of rolling and shaking of the can, our friends opened the lid and discovered the galaxy they had created. We discovered that if we made it a 2 or 3 step color process, removing one set of paint dunked marbles and replacing it with new paint-coated marbles, it created an interesting effect. Some friends were willing to invest the time, others went for immediate gratification and either chose 1 color or said "put them all in at once!". We tried it all! After the paper came out of the can, the stars were applied to create the constellations. It was interesting to watch the process each student used to choose where and how to put their stars. They even knew if they were using a hot colored stars (blue) or cold ones (red)! Be sure to view the the photos of this project.

We also worked on a dot to dot exercise. Each child was given verbal instructions one-on-one on how to complete a dot to dot (to first find the number 1, look for number 2, put the marker down on the dot and then draw the straightest line they possibly could to number 2, pick the marker back up off the page, and find the next dot they should go to). I got alot of "I know how!" But, dot to dots can present different challenges depending on their approach. Some go too quickly, missing the marker in their haste to finish, others miss some of the instructions, and some may skip numbers due to numeral recognition. As a method of kindergarten preparation for following verbal instruction, and to help them slow down and do neat work, (and receive guidance and praise for all effort), the instructions I gave were to write their name neatly in the top corner, and to work slowly and neatly so their lines would be straight. I watched up to about #4 on the dot-to-dot, and if they were on target, I left them to finish by themselves to see how they did independently. Friends who wanted/needed more guidance received one-on-one help as needed. I was very pleased with our students work and their ability to follow the instructions. Ms. Cari and I will continue to give the class more work that will be representative of what they will see in Kindergarten next Fall. (wow, can you imagine it?!)

Chapel was exciting today as Ms. Sissie and Ms. Tina took everyone outside to enjoy the fresh air and the SUN! What a wonderful thing our Sun is to our planet...and to our happy children who got to enjoy alot of it today. In fact, it may be time to send in some sunscreen. By the time the day was through, we had a couple of friends who had some pink cheeks!

After recess, we took turns rotating at three table centers of the rocket game, light bright, and beating Ms. Chrissie at Space Go Fish! We took our space memory game cards and turned it into a 4 person Go Fish game. I found, yet again, that our class is full of kids with minds like sponges and they have amazing memories of who asked who for "the alien" or "the planet Venus". They were sure racking up the pairs!! I lost several hands, a little pride, and possibly some hearing due to the gales of laughter and taunting preschool smack talk as they soundly beat me fair and square! All too soon it was time to eat snack and head for home after another great day at school!

Thursday, 3/25/10

Today was the last day in our Solar System unit. Thank you every one for sending your child in their planet color. We practiced our song in the am with great success. And now I have learned that is when I need to video tape. I was not thinking and right after an amazing time with Ms. Jane I asked them to line up and sing our song so that I could video tape for your guys. Mistake! They were exhausted and wanted nothing to do with Ms. Cari's plans. :(

In the am we made a card for Ms. Jane, since it was her last day with us. No one had any trouble telling me what they loved about Ms. Jane's classes.

They were given a Space Code rocket ship to decode and color. This was a challenge and one we will try again. The goal was to look at the code box where it told us that all pictures of the sun were to be colored yellow and all pictures of the star paint red, etc. I had friends who just started coloring with out hearing all my instructions. Others who only had patience enough to circle the image and not color the entire box and just a couple who saw the project to completion. That sheet is in their red folders. If you would like to have them finish coloring their sheets that would be great practice for them. Even if they say resist because they just don't like coloring insist they finish. There is a lot of coloring in Kindergarten. Much to my own son's chagrin when he told me at the beginning of the year that all this coloring is a “waste of his time”. :) We have not choice. It must be mastered.

I met with each child individually to wrap up our planet fact sheet. Just about everyone was able to tell me one or two things they liked about their planet.

Our focus today was the Moon. We read Moonshot, or I should say paraphrased (it is a long book). It has wonderful illustrations about the flight of Apollo 11 and the landing on the moon. “Cold and quiet, no air, no life,...” Apparently the kiddos knew much about the things told in this book due to the help of “Space Buddies” and one other popular show I just can't recall at the moment. :)

After we experienced this adventure through print, the kids had a chance to make their own moons out of grape play dough. They also drew themselves as astronauts and placed their American flag in place.

Ms. Lyneve let us borrow a really fun box full of Moon toys. The kids spent all day playing with the astronauts and space shuttles. Really helped us to reenact the scenes from the book we had just read.

In stead of music today Ms. Chrissie took the class for some special space time. They viewed constellations on the ceiling, read some fun books and even made up a new space song. :)

At lunch time we read a sweet book, Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. Based on the song of course, a little girl makes a wish on a star and this star takes her for an adventure in space. She sees the sun and the planets and gets dizzy while riding the rings of Saturn. :)

Ms. Jane is always wonderful, but today she out did herself. I told her we were studying the Solar System and she came up with really fun exercises all related to our unit. She had mini hula hoops that they held around their waste as rocket ships. They would blast off and then run around the gym to the theme music of Star Wars! Then they would land on a planet when the music was off and then blast off again when the music came back on. They raced past meteors and gathered moon rocks and much more. The kids had a wonderful time.

We finished our day with a quiet afternoon of play. We read The Berenstain Bears On the Moon at snack time. And saw that they put a flag on the moon just like we did.

Next week...EASTER!

3/16/10 - 3/18/10

Tuesday, 3/16/10

I had the children begin with their Journals this morning. I asked them to write the first letter of each or our planets. We sang our planet song many times to help jog the brain. I had our planet word cards on the table as a resource as well. It ended up being a group effort but we accomplished our goal. :)

At MM we learned more facts about our planets and even learned a silly sentence that was meant to help you remember the order of the planets in the solar system. Just like our song helps us to remember. We created our own silly sentence with random words. This is a great exercise for home. Name letters in the alphabet and have your child come up with a word that begins with that letter. After writing our letter G on the dry erase board it was off to AM centers.

We took all the planets we had created last week and began creating our solar system. This was a multi step process that all the kids did really well on. They each had a black paper with their painted Sun. We worked on finding our planets and putting them in the correct order in relation to the sun. We then added Saturn's and Uranus's rings. They punched our stars and glued them where they liked. I then put their silver finger print above their special planet. The idea was for them to create a little person/being that would represent themselves on their planet. :) My friends had their own ideas. :) We have some elaborate little aliens that are gracing our solar system now. All in all this was a very fun project to see to completion.

The rest of our day was low key. We played in the gym and when returning for PM Centers played quietly in our room. I had each child meet with me to add another fact or two to their Planet Chart. I love that they are able to recall facts to me now about their planets. They have really taken ownership of having a special one assigned to them.

Wednesday, 3/17/10 (Ms. Chrissie's Corner)

Today was interesting.... it was one of those days where you teach "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again...and then change plans".

We had several activities revolving around rockets and space exploration. At morning meeting we read from "The Best Book of Spaceships" and learned about how a rocket is built, how it lifts off and clears our atmosphere to enter space where there is no air, and no gravity. You can ask your child about such terms as the stages of a rocket ship, what gravity is, what our sun is, a meteor, a comet, an asteroid, a solar system and a galaxy! Between the entire class, we answered them all! We also read the book, "Stars, Stars, Stars" this afternoon and enjoyed answering what you use to look at stars (telescope) and what constellations are. Everyone knew that planet Earth was in the Milky Way galaxy and as the book reviewed each planet, they were right there shouting out what they knew too. So at the end of the book, I decided to quiz them (shhh! they didn't know it was their first pop quiz!) on their planets. They all got A+ too! I read the descriptive facts given at the end of the book for a planet and they told me which planet it was. I was very, very impressed. So impressed, in fact, that when I turned the page and saw all about a dozen glossary words like the ones mentioned above, I promised to reward them with a bone for the class if they did half as well on those as they did with their planet knowledge. And you guessed it! They earned that bone fair and square!

If only things had worked out as easily for our rocket experiment. It began well when we viewed about 15 minutes of a dvd about rocket ships and astronaut life from the Kennedy Space Center. Then armed with knowledge, we headed outside for our own little lift off experiment with vinegar and baking soda. But, "Houston, we had a problem!". We tried several times and then decided to be like the scientists who surely had to try more than once to get a rocket ship into space and try again another day (maybe with new batteries?!).

We now had plenty of time to make astronaut snacks for later in the day. We made pudding in ziploc baggies. Each student poured in their own powder packet and I added milk to a baggie with their name on it. We zipped it back up and commenced with shaking and squeezing for 90 seconds. We got in alot of counting practice! Ms. Tina came in to help too, which was wonderful because next we made Tang! We added Tang powder and the kids screwed on their lids (with their first name initial on it) and shook the Tang for another 90 seconds. As a class, we carried our rocket ship food to the kitchen refrigerator just in time for chapel.

It was rather chilly outside, but we needed fresh air, so we played outside. It was a wild playground day and I sure hope all that cool, crisp almost-spring air chased away the crazies from cabin fever we all seem to have!

After recess, we all worked on a dot-to-dot rocket ship and then played quietly with Concentration, Light Bright, Moon Rocks, Prisms, Geo-Wheels and Tanagrams. I played in the Concentration game and I have to say the friends I played with have amazing memories! And finally, the success story of the day - the astronaut snack was a big hit! We cut the corners off the ziploc bags and practiced being astronauts and slurped the pudding right from the bag! The Tang was great too. When is the last time you've had Tang?!

Thursday, 3/18/10

Today was our day for conferences and we were blessed to have Ms. Melissa take over the class for the day. I had full confidence that the children would have fun and learn in our absence. :) Here is Ms. Melissa's journal about her day with my wonderful class.

Ms. Cari and Ms. Chrissie were out of the classroom most of the day on Thursday at parent conferences, but Ms. Melissa got the opportunity to be the substitue teacher for the day. (Personal Note from Ms. Melissa--If you've never volunteered to sub in a classroom, you are really missing out! You find out so much about the kids' day and how every little thing--from the dress-up corner to the kitchen--is a learning opportunity!)

The kids came in and wrote their name on a special rocket journal page, and counted the numbers of letters in their name, writing that on their journal page as well. This was great preparation for an activity that we did later in the day. The class also led Ms. Melissa through morning meeting--they really know their routine!--and we read "Hedgie Blasts Off" by Jan Brett. Hedgie is just the janitor at the Space Center, but he is one heroic hedgehog when he's given the opportunity to go up into space and save the day! We learned that every hedgehog--and person--is important and has the chance to do great things. And we also learned about propulsion when pressure blasted Hedgie and all the coins out of the crater and helped the flowers bloom again. We also thought it was funny that all the important scientists in the book were dogs!

To leave morning meeting, each child wrote the letter "G" on the board and made the "G" sound. Of course, when the sound bag items came back out later in the day, we talked about the two sounds of "g"--hard G (as in Griffin) and soft G (as in Giraffe). That "G" can be pretty confusing!

Just as we'd done with the rocket journal page, we got out some special colorful rocket shapes and wrote one letter of our names on each shape. Each child built those letters into a tall name rocket, and then added a special "blast off" rocket with the number of letters in their name. This was a great graphing opportunity! We could see that Emmie Rose had the most letters in her name with 9, and Will and Jack had the fewest number of letters in their names with 4. There were more kids with 6 letters in their name in the classroom than any other number.

Lauren shared a great joke with us at lunchtime that made us all laugh: Why did the cookie go to the doctor? Because he felt "crummy!" After lunch we had our awesome gym time with Ms. Jane, along with Ms. Lyneve and Ms. Leigh's classes. She had us running, jumping and even already looking for Easter Eggs!

Ms. Cari and Ms. Chrissie had a break in all their meetings in the afternoon and were able to come back to the classroom to try a real rocket experiment! Just like with Hedgie, the pressure built up in the rocket--but unfortunately, our rocket didn't go flying like Hedgie did. It made some serious noise but we had a little malfunction on the flight deck and it never quite worked correctly. Back to the drawing board!

3/9/10 - 3/11/10

Tuesday, 3/9/10

Today was great. We began our Solar System unit today and I felt like all the kids were excited about this new adventure. Especially the boys. :) Our block center has Planet Heros, Spaceships and a space station. It was like a magnet all day for the kids.

We began morning meeting with a song we will sing for the next few weeks. A fun planet song to help us learn the order of the planets. It was met with much enthusiasm. We read Dogs in Space. A fun story about dogs visiting all the planets in our solar system. We learned a couple of basic facts about each planet. We followed that book up with The Solar System Book, brought in by Zaine. Jack was the first to pick up that this book was non fiction and our previous book was fiction. We ended our meeting by assigning a planet to every child. As a class we will learn about the planets in our Solar System but each child will focus in on their planet.

During AM centers aside from Planet Heroes and dressing up in Drama we painted our own planets. The kids used droppers and watercolors on coffee filters. They created beautiful planets.

After music with Ms. Chrissie and sharing our U sound bag items at lunch it was gym time with Ms. Jane. The theme of the hour was colors and fun.

PM Centers began with a review of our planets. I had puzzle pieces of the planets to match up with the planet words on our felt board. We decided which planet I was holding up and who this planet belonged to. Then the one who was assigned this planet would find the word on our felt board. The kids did great. Tomorrow they will be using these words as their resource when writing out the names of their planets.

When I dismissed them from the carpet we had more adventures with Planet Heroes, magnetic play and lots for Solar System puzzle building. :)

Wednesday, 3/10/10 (Ms. Chrissie's Corner)

Today we enjoyed our planet Earth! Upon arrival we began a fun art project to create the planet Earth the way astronauts see it from the moon - all blue, white and green color chunks and swirls made out of tissue and painted with liquid starch. It was alot of fun to see the different creations made by our out-this-world preschool artists!

Our new solar unit is so popular with our friends. Everyone came to school today eager to tell me what planet they were given yesterday. And then there are the new items in the classroom: from the library to the drama center to the blocks. So many things to explore we could barely wait to get to it. So we decided quite happily to play first and then have morning meeting prior to chapel rather than the other way around as usual. That's OK, we can reverse orbit every now and then!

At morning meeting we exercised our brains in a big way! We learned so many new things about our planets from a great book called Me and My Place in Space. It was perfect for helping us fill in the next section of the "K/W/L" chart Ms. Cari introduced on Tuesday. Today, we raised our hands whenever something we heard during the story caused us to "have a wondering". And, oh boy, did our friends have ALOT of wonderings!! Be sure to look at the chart. I can tell our students did alot of thinking on the subject of planets and the solar system! What great young minds they have. We found some of the answers ourselves on the pages of the book and in our own discussion during morning meeting. Other answers were discovered when we were lined up for chapel and had a couple minutes to spare during which I opened another book and read a few facts about each planet while we were washing up.

After lunch we enthusiastically ran out to the playground! Yes the playground! Some students actually squealed their way through the gate! It's been so long since we've been outside to play! It was a wonderful afternoon that we milked it for every minute possible.

We returned to our class to work on our Fact Sheets about our assigned planets. Each student wrote the name of their planet on a sentence strip using the resources available from the planet flannel board. Next we wrote things we learned today - Who, What & Where. What planet they have; Where it is in relation to the sun; and What fact they learned about their planet today. We used the book we read from morning meeting as a resource for reminders.

As soon as our work was done it was back to learning with our imaginations and reading books about space, and putting 20 stars in numerical order with our space partner. During snack time, we read the book On the Moon, which one student excitedly remarked, "oh cool, I've been wanting to read that one!". It was a great book about how astronauts get to the moon, what the moon is like, what it is like to go there and to be an astronaut and then come back home in a rocket ship. It even answered one of our "Wonderings" from this morning. It doesn't get any better than that.

Thursday, 3/11/10

Today was all about painting our planets. We whole punched Mercury and Pluto from our left over Eric Carle paintings. I had kids paint Jupiter, Saturn, Venus and Mars with a fun marble effect. The planet circles were put in pie tins and we decided what colors would work best for each planet. Then after globing the paint onto the circles the kids took turns rolling the marbles around in an effort to spread the paint amongst all the circles. There was a fine line in our rolling the tin to paint and rolling with too much enthusiasm and painting the floor as the marbles rolled out. :) It was fun. We added sparkles to Venus and to Mars our rocky red planet. For Uranus and Neptune we used water colors to create the green and blue planets.

After much painting and then cleaning of our room we sat down for morning meeting. I read to them Planets Around the Sun. A great non fiction book to once again back up our learned facts about our planets. We realized how just how big Jupiter is when we read about “The Great Red Spot” a storm on Jupiter. This storm is bigger then Earth. Wow! Another wow moment was when we read that if Earth was the size of a basketball, the sun would be as big as a basketball court. On Tuesday when you drop off take a moment to think that one over while in the gym. It puts things into perspective.

After music and lunch we went out on the playground again. Yea! The kids had a blast. You just don't realize how cooped up winter can make them till you get outside.

We began PM centers at the table with our personal fact sheets about our planets. We borrowed some oil pastel crayons from Ms Leigh and drew and colored our planet. A few of the kids had more facts to add to what they had learned about their planet as well.

We ended our day with a special snack. I cut pineapple rings and placed a cherry in the middle. Can you guess what our planet snack was? :) Saturn of course. :)

3/2/10 - 3/4/10

Tuesday, 3/2/10

The Snowy Owl was waiting to greet the kids this morning perched on our easel. :) We began our day by writing in our new Arctic Numbers book. After working on a similar project in January I feel like the kids “got it”. They worked independently and were proud to show me each page the completed. I loved hearing those that were farther a head help the friends who were just getting started.

We began Morning Meeting by dancing to a “Word Family” song. We will begin in the next few weeks and to the end of school focusing on word families and very basic pre primary words. Our goal is for the kids to begin learning sight words over the summer before Kindergarten begins.

We learned many facts about the Snowy Owl. See if the kids can recall for you another name for the Snowy Owl. Ukpik! We talked about their yellow eyes and fantastic sight and the fact that their heads can turn fully around in a circle. The kids loved seeing this when demonstrated on our Owl puppet. I brought in a down blanket to demonstrate how the feathers of the Owl are used to insulate their bodies and keep the warm air in and the cold air out. The kids cuddled up in the blanket to experience the warmth as I read a non fiction book, Snowy Owl.

We then moved to our AM Center time and made our very own Snowy Owls. I was so proud of the kids. This was a very involved project that took thinking and many steps and problem solving before our Owls were complete. They were all anxious to get started and many moved on with out my help to complete the project.

After lunch we read a Ukrainian folk tale, The Mitten, by Jan Brett. The kids loved the story about a boy who just had to have a white mitten but lost it when he went out to play. Meanwhile the animals of the forrest crawled into this Mitten...and I'll just let the kids tell you the rest.

After gym time we came back to the room and painted with watercolors all the character animals that had crawled into the white mitten. It was wonderful to have 100% participation and no one rushed through to get to the play dough or blocks. :)

Wednesday, 3/3/10 (Ms Chrissie's Corner)

Two new things in the classroom this week were very exciting for everyone. The new Veggie Tales rug that arrived on Tuesday was still the talk of the town and featured prominently in our morning meeting lesson, and the scale that made an entrance today. You have to love preschoolers! They were all jumping on to see who weighed the most, grabbing each friend as soon as they arrived and getting them on the scale. Some felt if they assumed a "cool pose" the scale would show a different weight. Well, that wasn't the intended purpose of having a scale today, but we had our fun, and then we got down to business! We put into 3 white bags: a 5 lb bag of rice; a cantaloupe; and a honeydew melon. Then we started weighing those. The scale didn't care for our rice, so we removed it and used blocks instead. This was an all day, kid directed project to compare and find things in the classroom they could put in the bags to equal approximately 5 lbs. We found out why at morning meeting.

At morning meeting we all took a letter to sit on, and went around the circle, and everyone sounded out the letters and our friend's had a chance to come up with a word that started with the letter they were sitting on. We all tapped our noses if we agreed that word started with their letter, pronouncing the starting sound, the letter and the word a couple of times. If help was needed, I either gave clues or a word for them to tap their nose if they thought it was a correct word for their letter. We spent about 15 minutes on this during MM.

Then we learned more about the Snowy Owl, from the book of the same title. Specifically, about two important measurements - it's wingspan, which is 5 feet long, and its weight which is 5 lbs. Yesterday the class learned about what it looked like and other facts, so we added to our Snowy Owl knowledge, such as it is an owl that hunts both night and day, how it catches its prey, what it likes to hunt, how many eggs a Snowy Owl lays, etc. We passed around the bag of rice pretending it was a Snowy Owl so we could really get a feel for what 5 lbs felt like. Some felt it was quite heavy, and others thought a Snowy Owl wasn't all that big; but everyone thought it was funny for some reason! Then when we took a tension rod and with the help of a couple friends, a measuring tape, and some masking tape we measured it to 5 feet long, and taped it shut. When I swooped it around (watching out for our globe and our friends!) like an Snowy Owl about to get a lemming (which is a rodent like mouse and the favorite prey of Snowy Owls) everyone was pretty impressed when it landed in the middle of morning meeting on the rug and its wings spread across the width of our new Veggie Tales rug! "Wow! That's pretty big!" said one friend.

This was a perfect introduction to our projects of the day: Weights and Measures. Besides weighing things to 5 lbs on the scale, we would also be helping each other measure our own wingspans as if we were Snowy Owls to see how our wings compare to a Snowy Owl's. Then with my help, we made half of a wing pattern on a folded piece of colored paper and cut it out, unfolding it to find our very own wings! It was fun to see their faces as their wings appeared and then we held them back up to their arms and sure enough, it was exactly the length of their arms right to their fingertips! We are great measurers! Each child began the project as independently as possible and I followed up with help for the tricky feather cutting if needed. I was proud of their efforts because the paper was giving everyone alot of trouble with curling and it took some perserverence to see it through. I hope you got a chance to see the results of our wingspan project displayed outside our classroom! If not, please enjoy the photos taken during the measuring.

After lunch and another day of indoor recess (c'mon Spring!) we went to work on lacing our mittens, a project from the story The Mitten which will be carried through with Ms. Cari on Thursday.

During snack time I read, Owly, a cute story about a young owl who always has yet another question for his mother at bedtime, like how many stars are there, or how deep is the ocean? His mother is a wise owl, and lets Owly find the answers to his questions himself, and so we turned pages counting "One Thousand and one, One Thousand and two...". The class enjoyed the process, and enjoyed exclaiming "NOT AGAIN!" about the third time Owly had another question and his mother sent him off to find the answer! Don't we all just like getting quick answers to our questions?! In the end, Owly realizes some things just can't be counted or measured, just like his love for his mother; and he tells her that he loves her more than all the stars in the sky and deeper than the ocean.

Thursday, 3/4/10

Today was the end of our never ending Winter unit. We finished up our arctic number books and wrote in our journals about what keeps the Snowy Owl warm in winter. Almost all of the kids were able to tell me it was their feathers. And even a couple tried to write out the word. :)

During Morning Meeting we re read The Mitten with our very own mitten and animal characters. The kids really enjoyed this activity. They were invested by having activities (the painting of the characters and the lacing of the mitten) all week leading up to this moment.

As a group we read aloud the arctic number books we had also worked on all week. This is an on going exercise in number recognition and reading skills.

We then all gathered around the table for some Kindergarten work. :) One of our Snowy Owl facts is that in a town in Canada the snowy owl is known by another name. “Ukpik.” The kids wrote out on sentence strips “Ookpik” as it sounds and Ukpik like we saw in the book. Ask your child what Ookpik stands for. :)

Our art activity today was to make baby snowy owls. We wrapped cotton snow around pine cones, glued eyes and cut out beaks. At first the kids weren't so sure about the texture of the pine cones while wrapping the cotton/feathers around. But they all in the end did a great job. They wrote their names on brown/tan paper that represented our Tundra for the Owls to rest on. All of our winter crafts will go home on Tuesday morning. Please make sure to take them at drop off.

Next week Solar System!