Measurement, Creativity, and Experts

I'm fairly sure I sent you home some tired Kindergarteners today! What a lot of learning and new experiences this week!

First, we worked on our Only One You - inspired book. 

We painted our clay rocks to be fish.

Then we created our alternate background. In the original book, the author put her rock fish on photos of underwater scenes, and some of our students have chosen to do that. Other students wanted to take those underwater pictures. So we filled a bucket with sand

 

Then used blue food colouring in water 

Then placed props...

And finally took pictures, with sharks and whales (donated by Mrs. H - thank you!) as the supporting characters. 

Next, we add "wise words" to these on the iPads (developing technology and letter skills). It's been so interesting to flesh out the idea of wisdom with the students. We talked about this with the 10 commandments, the 7 Habits, and now this book. I've prompted the students by asking what they would tell a little brother or sister about how to be nice and obey Jesus - we have some excellent advice coming out!

We also started a new math unit on measurement!

We sorted out furniture for mama, papa, and baby bear in the story of Goldilocks,

and examined the concept of shortest to tallest, with books, with our classmates, and piles of unifix cubes!

Finally, we finished our guinea pig project!

Of course, we continue to care for it, and will use Miss Carrot's weight and food to apply what we know about measuring, graphing, and recording - the learning never stops!- but we have completed our final project of this Project-Based-Learning unit!

We practiced all week to share what we know with an expert. Having a veterinarian technician hear what they have learned and read their published book provides them with an authentic audience, one who can give informed feedback on their work. 

Mrs. Nicole came in as our expert - the students worked very hard this week decided what they wanted to tell her (they decided on showing our book, and writing a song about guinea pigs), planning how to set up the room, and then moving furniture, and practice, practice, practicing!

They did such a great job! After finishing their performance, Mrs. N. showed students how to determine if a guinea pig was healthy, and how we can check in our own class if she's doing well. Every student even got to listen to her heart beat with a stethoscope!

The dramatic play center is now set up as a vet office (thanks for that as well, Mrs. N.!) I'm sure this will provide lots of fun learning for next week! 

I look forward to seeing all of you parents next week at parent-teacher conferences!

P.S. Examples of the puff paintings we got to do last week for winning the recycling contest!