Busy Wednesday Afternoon

We had a very busy but exciting afternoon here in kindergarten. In math we worked on writing number sentences where we would use pictures to represent and solve addition and subtraction stories. We worked through a bunch all together then each student got their own page to write and illustrate their own problem to be bound into a class book. 

     






 In addition to writing their story problems, the students had an opportunity to continue working on a non-fiction writing project. This is the culminating project after learning about non-fiction text features the previous two weeks. The students each have their own non-fiction book template and are reading a book with a partner to fill in facts and illustrations.

 

The seeds we planted last Thursday have grown very quickly. Most of the students have figured out that it is grass but some are still holding out hope for it to be either a sunflower or daisy. This morning everyone grabbed their plant, examined it for awhile and then wrote in their journal what they they saw, felt, and what they thought it was.

Making sure we're giving our plant plenty of water

Say Cheese!

Marshmallow and Toothpick Shapes

This afternoon students got to work with marshmallows and toothpicks to make 2- and 3-dimensional shapes and explore their properties. I went around asking students what shapes they used, if they had figured out how to make a cube, how many many marshmallows and toothpicks did they need to build their shapes and structures.

Adding some sunshine to the classroom

The kiddos kept telling me it was time to take down our snowmen since it is now spring. So yesterday and today we worked on making some suns to hang up in our classroom to "Spring" it up a bit. They each painted a paper plate yellow, painted a face on it, then traced their hand 8 times and cut it out and glued it to the back side to make the rays coming off of the sun.

Fantastic Friday!

We had an eventful Friday here at Van Allen. The morning started off with us being able to go outside and check out a giant dump truck. We had learned about all kinds of wheels a couple weeks before spring break so this was a neat experience for the students to look at.

This afternoon in math we worked on creating patterns while making music. We discovered that a beat in music is just a repeated pattern. It seemed like this made the idea of patterns to the students much more meaningful. Each group of three students got three instruments and some time to come up with a pattern on their own. They wrote the pattern out using a white board. They used shapes to represent each person and their instrument.