Volcanoes and Dinosaurs have taken over F 16!

We are in a prehistoric state in our room.  We are learning so much about volcanoes and about dinosaurs.  These two subjects have taken over our reading, our writing, our math and even our letter of the week.  Let me show you some of the highlights from the first two weeks of February.

The children are learning about chemical reactions in this science lab.  They combine baking soda and vinegar (thank you parents for sending it in) and watch the chemical reaction that is created. 

We are doing this science lab because this looks like a volcano erupting.  The kids cannot get enough of this lab.

The children here are developing fine motor skills by using the eye dropper (which we got through the Donors Choose project you helped to fund).  They are also negotiating how to take turns, how to share resources and they are expanding their vocabulary and their speaking and listening skills by discussing what they are observing.

This is a neat dinosaur themed math game using geometric shapes to create patterns and pictures.

We watched several short videos about volcanoes from Discovery  and National Geographic Kids.  I also shared with them books and pictures I brought back from my trip to Hawaii.  I was lucky enough to go to the Volcano National Park.  I even have some lava rocks which you will see later in this post.  This is one child documenting what she learned from some of the books and videos we have been using for our research.

This child is studying a lava rock and documenting what she observes (sorry it is so blurry).

This child is very closely examining this lava rock from Hawaii.  They had lots of questions.  Seeing the rocks up close helped them to understand that lava is hot, melted rock, and when the lava cooled it formed these rocks.

This child is examining another lava rock.

This child referred to himself as a vulcanologist! 

These children are building a volcano in the block area.  We also talked about symmetry.

This child is using the dinosaurs to sort them and arrange them from largest to smallest.

We are having a ball with this unit of study.  I have brought in lots of books on these topics from the St. Charles County Library.  We have some very serious researchers in our room.  I love it when they find out something new about either a dinosaur or about a volcano.  They are devouring the books and dinosaurs and volcanoes are starting to show up in writing workshop in some of the books they are writing. 

Next, when we get more newspapers donated, we will start constructing our volcanoes.  We are all so excited!  Check back soon to see our latest.

Friendship Party

I wanted to share a few pictures of the Friendship party and some of there Valentine Boxes.  Thank you to the H's, the C's and the S's for putting together the party and being there to help.  We all had a great time.

Pin the Lips on Ms. Arrendale

I love the art work.  I look good!

Round and Round we go, where we stop, nobody knows!

Now I have lips in my eye.  This was a fun game!  We all laughed and laughed!

The was called "heart-a-stack".  The kids worked so hard on staking all of the hearts.  It was really hard!

 

New video's to support classroom concepts

I thought I would share what we are watching in class with you. 

These two videos support the rule of "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking".  We are starting to get into more complex rules during word work to help them read more difficult text and understand/decode the words.


They love these silly Numtums.  Whatever helps our visual learners "get" the numerical concepts we are working on works for me.  We also love these money songs!

One of our all time favorites is still  Alpha Blocks.  They are amazing and the kids really get into the episodes and remember so much about the letter sounds and blending.  This is one of their favorite episodes.

What we are watching on the Smart Board this winter

I know many of you use the learning videos at home to support your child's education.  Here is what we are watching this month!  Enjoy.

We use this counting by tens song by Have Fun Teaching.  We also use the counting by fives song and counting by twos song as well during math workshop.  You can find these on You Tube.

The children still love the Alphablocks and this is a wonderful tool to use to support letter sounds, blending sounds, learning about the ch, sh, th and wh sounds which can be very hard for young children to master.  Just type in Alphablocks into You Tube and let your child watch several of these short, engaging mini lessons which support their developing reading skills.  This is by far the children's favorite thing to watch as a brain break during reading workshop.

 

We used this You Tube video to learn about how baby penguins learn how to walk.  The children each got a turn standing on my feet like a baby penguin while I walked around with them.  This very short video is way too cute!

 

This is one of the video songs we use to practice our rhyming skills.  Beware, once you hear it it will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day!

 

Next week our letter is Ee.  Each week we watch the letter video from Have Fun Teaching to explore the sounds, shape, words and rules for each letter.  If you find your child is having difficulty with a few of their letter sounds let them watch the letter song for that letter.  The videos are short, the tunes are catchy and the kids become very focused on the video.

Our other favorite little video to support our letter of the week learning is from StoryBots on You Tube.  These videos are also a wonderful tool for vocabulary expansion.

I hope these video links will help you have fun with your child while you support their learning.  Thank you for exposing them at home.  The more exposure they have to these critical foundational skills the better they will become in all academic areas.  If you have any songs or videos that you are aware of to support reading, writing or science concepts please share them with me!

 

 

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!

 

 

What we have been doing in F16

I wanted to share with you some of the awesome work the kids have been doing this New Year.  We have only been back for three days but here is a snap shot of what they are doing.  They are working so hard and making amazing progress!  I hope this inspires some wonderful conversations with you and your kiddos!  Thanks for doing an amazing job at supporting their education at home.  It is making all of the difference in the world.

Reading Workshop - Reading Buddies

The kids have started using reading buddies during reading workshop.  They use them during independent reading time.  They read to their buddies!  It is awesome to listen to them teach their buddies how to read.  It is a wonderful motivator for them and they feel so big to be able to use them properly (we tried this earlier in the year and the reading buddies were too much of a distraction, but now they are so grown-up they have earned the privilege of using reading buddies during reading workshop).  Try using their favorite stuffed animal at home when they read and sit back and listen to them and be amazed.  I am!

 

Math Workshop

We are really diving into money concepts in math workshop.  The kids are using the money during math center time and in dramatic play.  They are starting to play store in dramatic play using money to buy and sell items.  We are also using coin stampers, sorting and classifying coins by attribute and we are starting to learn what the amounts of each coin are worth.   You can help your child understand money by letting them help at the grocery store (tell them this is a $1.27, we need a one dollar bill, one quarter worth 25 cents and two pennies worth 2 cents).  This will help them start to understand money AND will help them with basic addition!

 

I bought some new math toys over the break.  These are magnetic builders and they are using them to create 3-D shapes.  They love this new math manipulative!

 

These kids designed their very own math game during math center time last week!  I was amazed.  They role the dice, add the numbers, and move the car that many spaces (the shape button manipulative's represented the spaces).  The first one to get to the space ship (built out of more math manipulative's, the counting cubes) wins the game.  WOW!  I could never have come up with something this cool!

 

These children are using our shape stamps to explore shapes.  They are tested on the eight basic shapes (rhombus, square, circle, oval, rectangle, triangle, heart, star).  They love THE SHAPE NAME GAME song by Have Fun Teaching on You Tube which shows 2-D and 3-D shapes.  They love all of the wonderful names the more complex shapes have.  I will do a post with all of the new songs we are using during all of our subjects.  I know lots of you use these videos at home to support their learning!

Science - Learning about States of Matter

We are taking advantage of the cold weather to explore the states of matter.  I use water because I can demonstrate it in three states, liquid, solid and gas.  We did an experiment with water I added food coloring to and then put into balloons and froze.  The kids LOVED this experiment.  Some of the kids made some amazing observations. 

The water in it's solid state

Using our five senses to explore the ice

When it started to melt and change into a liquid the children noticed some air bubbles inside of the ice.  The were memorized (and so was I).  They were really observing the changes in the state of matter and were intrigued to watch and feel it melt.  I will later take this activity and have them transfer that knowledge to the icebergs in the Arctic.  We are learning about Arctic Animals in our Non-Fiction Unit in Reading Workshop and this activity will help illustrate what we are learning about the Polar Bears and the glaciers melting and the impact that is having on the polar bears.

You can see the ice starting to melt and the water dripping below it.

All of the kiddos exploring the ice balls in their solid state.  They made lots of observations about the ice (and yes, we use the word observation).  Some of their observations included the fact that it was cold, it was slick, it was heavy, it was melting and changing, that there were air bubbles inside and that it was hard to hold.

I added salt to the ice balls to make an ice man.  I wanted to show the children how the ice could help the ice balls stick together.  They thought I was a magician!  The salt also helped them to see the melting by causing the water to refreezes as it slide down the ice ball.  It showed them the "rivers" in the ice caused by the water melting.  Again, I will refer to this when we learn about the glaciers in our Reading Workshop Non-Fiction Unit.

Close up of the ice man before I added the salt.

Exploring the ice man as it starts to melt.  They started to notice water accumulating in the black tub and "river" and holes in the ice as it set out in the classroom for an hour.

This child wanted to do some observations during center time this afternoon.  She really studied our ice man and started to record her observations.  I didn't get a picture but she added lots of words to her picture which included:  ice is made of water, water is cold. the ice is melting, and many more.  I will try to get a picture of her finished recording and post it tomorrow.  I was amazed.  I think she is on her way to be a scientist.

Sorry this is blurry, but here she is adding the "rivers" to the ice man documenting how the water makes marks on the ice as it melts and changes from a solid to a liquid.

The ice man after about two hours sitting out in the classroom.  Look at this with your child and have them tell you their observations about how the ice man is changing in the heat.

Close up of the ice man after two hours in the classroom.  This is so cool!

 

We talked about how scientists make hypothesis.  I explained that a hypothesis was a guess.  Each child made a hypothesis about how long it would take for the ice man to melt (or change from a solid to a liquid).  Each child recorded this hypothesis by placing their name under their "guess".  I am leaving our ice man out all night in our room and tomorrow we will see who's hypothesis was correct.  I loved listening to them tell me why they chose the hypothesis they did.  What a bunch of "smarty smarties"!

I will update you tomorrow about how this experiment went.  I hope you enjoyed this post!

 

 

Problems getting pictures to load

Dear Families,
I am trying to update the blog (for the past two days) but blogger is not letting me upload the photos for some reason from my computer.  I will jump the pictures and try from school tomorrow.  Bear with me.  I have lots of cool stuff to share!