Our Second Grant and Winter Update

Our Second Grant from Donors Choose was funded and we received our items this week!

I cannot thank you enough for your support for our second Donors Choose grant this year.  We received three large boxes this week and we were so excited to open them!  We now how so many science, math and manipulative's to help us learn more about the world around us.  The clock has been the best in cutting down our transition times and we have gained so much more learning time each day.  We have Lincoln logs, Lego's, coin stamps, a cash register, play dough letter stampers, marble run, a fantastic microscope and a whole science kit for magnets and test tube experiments.  I am so excited to begin incorporate these new items into our learning activities. 

The children are using the Lego's for building, counting, sorting and graphing. 

The marble run is a fantastic tool for problem solving, fine motor skills and science concepts.

We are now using the cash register to help support our learning about money concepts.  The children are using the coins and cash register to play pet store, grocery store and pizza parlor!  They are also creating signs increasing their love of writing.

This is my favorite tool!  We use this for timing our clean up times, coming to carpet, rotating centers and tracking our stamina during reading and writing workshop!

These children are recreating the setting from many of the Laura Wilder books we have read throughout the school year.  They get out the books and use them as reference tools when building their old time homes and forts.

 

Penguin Measuring - a part of our Arctic Animals Unit

Our Art Teacher drew out these awesome penguins for us to use with our interactive bulletin board outside of our classroom.  The kids took the Unix cubes from our math center and used them to measure the different penguins.  This really helps them use their upper level math counting skills.  It is also helping them learn how to work together to solve a real life math problem.

This is the smallest penguin.  The children estimated how many Unix cubes it would take to measure each penguin and then had to see how close their estimation was to the actual number of cubes needed to measure the height.

This child is figuring out the difference between the height of each penguin, which is a more advanced math skills.

These children are working hard to create larger and larger measurements.

Our specials teachers are so amazing to support our classroom learning by lending their talents to help our learning in the classroom.  I could have never have made this learning bulletin board without Mrs. T's (our are teacher) help.  She drew out each of the five different types of penguins so I could paint them and create the bulletin board.  Thank you so much Mrs. T!  The children are so motivated to participate in our math activities using these great penguins.  We will start researching each of the penguin types and we will gather facts and post them on the bulletin board as the month progresses.

We read Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner and illustrated by Mark Buehner.  The children love this book so we used it in our writing workshop as well.  I hope we get at least one big snow to support our winter unit.  There are so many wonderful ways to connect science, reading and writing to make the learning of words and sentences so much more meaningful to young children.  It is easier to write about something you have experience with, and I want them to experience making a snowman at school so they can add descriptive words to their writing.

 

This child wrote about what he thought his snowman would do at night when no one was watching.  He is showing a good understanding of basic writing skills such as putting spaces between words, capitalizing the first word and sounding out each syllable to write new words and express his thoughts.  We will work on putting punctuation in our writing next.

This child is starting to understand that letters make words and words create stories.  He could tell me exactly what his snowman did at night.  He turns into a Ninja Turtle!  How creative!  You can also start to make out some words in this writing such as "my", "at" and his name. 

This child is really working hard on independently sounding our complex words.  I can see she is ready for me to do a mini lesson with her on the "WH" sound (for the word wheels).  I really encourage the children to try to sound out their words and write them independently.  This way I can tell what lessons/skills they are ready for me to introduce.  I also see that she understands that certain words need to be capitalized but she is ready for a mini lesson for starting the sentence with a capital letter but leaving other words in lower case.  I am proud of her independence during writing workshop.  I can also tell by this writing sample that she understands that punctuation is needed at the end of the sentence.

This child is showing a good understanding of sentence structure.  Her first letter is capitalized, she has spaces between her words and she has punctuation at the end of her sentence.  I will encourage her during writing workshop to add additional sentences to tell a more detailed story.  So many of the children are really into writing workshop and they are so excited to realize that they are now independently being able to share their thoughts on paper.

Winter Science Experiment on How Some Animals Stay Warm During the Winter Months

We have been studying many Arctic Animals.  One of the children's favorites is the polar bear. I took this interest and found a neat science experiment to show them how the polar bear stays warm in the iceberg filled waters of the Arctic.  Here we have a bucket of ice water and a bag full of Crisco shortening.  We used these items to show the children how the blubber or fat keeps the polar bear insulated. 

These children tried to see how long they could hold their hands in the ice water without any protection.  BRRRRR, it was cold!

Next I had the children place their hand into a bag of the shortening.  They were then asked to place their hand back into the ice water.  Next they were encourage to talk about and describe their experience.

The children were amazed at how warm the fat kept their protected hand.  You could see the light bulbs going off for each child as they completed this science experiment.  The language, vocabulary and excitement as they explained the difference between being in ice water without the fat and being in the water with the fat was so exciting for me to witness!  We have so many budding scientists in our classroom. 

My hope is that you will view this post with your child and encourage them to tell you in detail what they remember about doing these projects.  The more they can reach back into their memories and recall the information the better chance they will have for these experiences to stay in their long term memory.  This will help them become more descriptive writers, this will help them make more meaningful connection when reading new books on similar topics, and will help them become better at verbally retelling their experiences and become a more confident and descriptive public speaker.  I hope you enjoyed this post.  More to come very soon!