To celebrate Earth Day, Room #7 read The Lorax. We then brainstormed a variety of suggestions that we can implement to help keep the earth clean and healthy! After the kids wrote down their fantastic ideas, they completed the art component of this activity. Using a little blue and green paint, marbles, and a shoebox, they created their own unique worlds. To top it off, we took pictures of their cute mugs with a Lorax moustache on them! Check out our back bulletin board to see their priceless results!
The kiddos have been hard at work learning about 3-D shapes and noticing them in their environment. We are continuing our math stations from last week this week! We needed some extra time with these stations before moving on to new ones! We are chatting a lot about geometry and number sentence, and also chicks, of course!
- Egg Weighing – With a partner, cherubs took turns weighing various plastic eggs with Unifix cubes. They then recorded their answers. Finally, they had to decide which color egg weighed the most and which weighed the least. Everyone LOVED this station!
- Snap-it (with white boards) – Snap It! – Working with numbers six to twelve, students made trains of cubes. They then “snap” their trains at various places. Putting part of their trains in front of them and placing the other part behind them, students worked to figure out how many were hidden. In this manner, students are learning to describe a number by its parts. For those tricky high numbers, students used invisible buddy lines as a strategy to determine the hidden number. They then wrote the corresponding number sentence!
- Fix-it Strips – At this center, students encountered a new and tricky concept of “changing numbers”. Independently, the kiddos received a fix-it strip. Using cubes, they built a tower that represented their first number. Next, they changed that tower to match the second number. I asked them to articulate what they did by telling me if they added or took away cubes and how many. Excellent work, cherubs!
- Number Arrangements – At this station, the boys and girls explored various designs they could make using about 10 toothpicks, depending on each student’s individual skills and comfort level. After some experimenting, they then glued their creations on to a piece of paper. Finally, they subitized and wrote down the groups they recognized. So fun!
- Combo Toss, Part 2 – This game provides a visual display of the number combinations that make up each sum from 1 to 10. With a partner, a cherub rolled 2 number cubes and built two stacks of cubes to match the numbers rolled. He/she then placed the two stacks in a column of the game board according to the sum of the numbers rolled. For an extension, as the students built their sums, they wrote down the corresponding number sentences! This was an extra challenge that the Kindergartners were excited to face!
- Ones-Ladders - At this center, the boys and girls picked an activity sheet that challenged them. Then, they filled in the missing “rungs” on the ladder with consecutive numbers! Each rung had different visible numbers, so the cherubs had to think very carefully to figure out which numeral came before and after!
- Fill the Hexagon - With what different shapes can you make a hexagon? At this center, everyone picked pattern block shapes to determine how to fill in their hexagons. This center really inspired the kids to think critically and carefully to see where they could fit each shape!
This is our last week of persuasive writing! The boys and girls continue to work hard on their persuasive letters addressed to home, to school personnel, and to world leaders. They are really getting good at thinking of fix-it ideas for the problems they wish they could change. Such sophisticated writing…be on the lookout for letters over vacation week! Enjoy :)!
We have started a new unit in Reader’s Workshop entitled: Avid readers! After learning what the new word meant, our readers came up with many ways one can be an avid reader: having stacks of books in waiting, reading in various places, never stopping, and really paying attention to the details. We also added that avid readers sometimes feel the way their characters feel. The boys and girls started marking pages in their books where they recognized a feeling. Keep it up, avid readers!
Have a wonderful April vacation! See you in a week!