A New Home For Mrs. I's Hermit Crab

As an end of year activity, the students worked very hard in small groups to create new sea creatures to create our own version of A Home For Hermit Crab. Each group worked together to create a 3-D sea creature for our Hermit Crab's new home. We then did a shared pen writing, where all of the students worked together to write a new version of the story, using their own sea creatures.

Here is the video we created with the help of the amazing Mrs. Klipfel!

Touch Tank

To cap off our amazing week of learning about tide pools and ocean life, we were visited by the wonderful Ellen Gothel of Explore The Ocean World!
Ellen brings in a wide variety of animals found in the North Atlantic including sea stars, lobsters, snow crabs, sea urchins, a living fossil the horseshoe crab, and many other animals. The Touch Tank visit is always fun and hands-on for the kids - the BEST kind of learning! 
There were so many great moments from the visit that we wanted to share, so we made another slideshow! I hope you have fun watching with your student - and maybe they'll share some of the exciting things they learned from Ellen!
Touch Tank Visit by Slidely Slideshow

Sandy Point Field Trip

Mrs. I's class at Sandy Point

This past week we visited Sandy Point to explore tide pools. We have been studying tide pools in the classroom and have even begun to create our own tide pool bulletin board, but we got to explore a REAL tide pool with our guide, Dave. 
The kids had a wonderful time working together under Dave's guidance and were able to find all sorts of sea creatures including crabs, sand dollars, seaweed, periwinkles, and moon snails. We learned a lot from Dave about the different animals and plants we found, what and how they eat, and how each work together to create a tide pool.
Watch our slideshow for all of the pictures from our day at Sandy Point!
  2015 Sandy Point Field Trip by Slidely Slideshow

Tide Pool Fun

This past week, we've been learning about the different sections of a tide pool - splash zone, high tide, medium tide, low tide, and the animals and plants that live in each of the areas. 

We learned a TON about sea stars, too. We not only created sea stars for our tide pool, but we also learned how to use a graphic organizer to help us remember the facts we've learned about sea stars and to write full sentences about them. The students really enjoyed this type of non-fiction writing. I cannot wait to see how their writing develops over the next few weeks as we continue to write about the sea animals that live in tide pools. 

Here is a sample of writing and the beginnings of our classroom tide pool. The next few weeks will be exciting and fun to say the least - I cannot wait to keep sharing your student's wonderful work!

We've been reading non-fiction books on sea stars this week. The students have learned about lots of genres of literature this year, including this very special genre of expository non-fiction that has a main topic (sea stars) and details about the main topic (they have 5 or more rays, they can be many different colors, they don't have blood!).

This student wrote about the sea star's stomach and how it comes out of the mouth, that it can stick to rocks, and that their arms are called rays.

The beginnings of our tide pool with our sea stars, mussels, and barnacles!

The best part of our tide pool bulletin board is that we made it 3-D! Thank you to all of the families for sending in recyclable materials.

Wait, there are books that have real things in them?!

Since the beginning of school, kindergarten has been learning about different genres of literature. First we had Fiction, then came Animal Fantasy,  next was the all exciting Folktale, and last, but not least, poetry. This month, we're learning all about nonfiction and...

What are the differences between FICTION and NON-FICTION?

To begin, last week we discussed what we noticed about nonfiction books and made an anchor chart.

This week, we looked at the differences between fiction and nonfiction stories with a partner. The students looked at the books and discussed what they saw. Then, we came up with a new anchor chart: fiction vs. nonfiction.

The students noticed really wonderful text features of nonfiction books including photographs, table of contents, index, word list, and most importantly, that the books we thought were nonfiction had all real things in them. Last week, one student even saw that nonfiction books can teach us things!

When asked which book their group thought was fiction, they held up the books on the left.
When asked which were nonfiction, they held up the books on the right.

Now that we're a bit more familiar with nonfiction books, we did a fun activity with Scholastic book order magazines. We cut out books we thought were fiction and nonfiction and sorted them accordingly.

The student's LOVE learning about this genre mainly because they're in love with the National Geographic animal books. If you don't have any in your home library, Scholastic has them available to order through the monthly book order!

Tell Me How It Made You Feel..

It's been a while since we've shown you all our writing, so I thought ...
"what better time than now?!"
Now, as we move into the spring of kindergarten, we know how to be writers: stories have words AND detailed pictures, we write about things that happen to us, and we're using our own inventive spelling (went may look like wet OR because may look like bcuz). These skills show how far your student's have come as writers and how much they have learned so far. Just look where we were in September here!

Each time we begin Writer's Workshop we come together and help Mrs. I. write a story making sure we use what we know about letters and sounds and our sight words!

This month, we're beginning to focus on making sure we add in a sentence that tells the reader how it made the writer feel. In the above story, I used my opinion (the food was yummy) to tell the reader how I felt about my story. I am trying to help students move away from the old standbys: it was fun, it was good, it made me feel happy, it made me feel sad, etc. 
Now it's the student's turn to tell us how they feel...

I have a wiggly tooth. Hannah wiggled one of my teeth. My one tooth felt like it was bleeding.
[This writer is exploring adding in details about feeling physical things (which is still a feeling!)]

I went bike riding with my sister. It made me happy. And my mom (was there).

I saw the movie Big Hero Six. I went with mommy and daddy and Mary. I love it.

Keep a look out for more details in your student's writing. Ask them to make sure they tell you:1. Where they went2. Who they were with3. How it made them feel

This is a writing Common Core Standard: W.K.3 - Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.

Thank You, Mystery Reader!

We want to send a BIG thank you to Mr. Winfrey for visiting us last week as our Dr. Seuss Mystery Reader! The kids loved hearing you read and about your wonderful work as a volunteer firefighter in Topsfield!

 

Happy 100th Day of School!

We finally made it to the 100th day of school! 80 more to go before first grade!!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Magnetic Fields

We're back to exploring properties of solids (after a brief visit with liquids for the bubble workshop)! This week, we've discovered magnets and explored how they work.

Why do we study magnets? 

To begin, we read the book What Makes a Magnet? (It's a great book with lots of ideas on how you and your student can make magnets at home!) The book helped us to understand why magnets are such a special type of solid.

The students learned that magnets pick up other solid things that have iron in them. Then, they brainstormed what types of things WOULD be picked up by a magnet (paper clips, staples, other magnets, etc) and what WOULDN'T be (paper, elastic bands, plastic).

Also, the students learned that each magnet has two poles - a north and south pole. I asked the students to try and observe their magnets' poles. Some were successful in finding that some magnets didn't want to come together easily and we discussed that it was because it was the same pole (north to north or south to south) they were trying to connect. Once the students turned over the magnet, they stuck together easily. The students who found this happening during our exploration were really fascinated by it!

Then, it was off to exploring magnets on our own.

Here are a few pictures of the students in action!

Bubbles, bubbles and more bubbles!

Kindergarten scientists at work.

Kindergarteners are scientists. They view the world with wonder and excitement and ask such amazing questions! Your kindergartener is currently learning about what makes up the world - Matter! 
We've discussed that there are three types of matter - solids, liquids and gases. We explored a bit with solids and now, with the Bubble Workshop, we've started to explore liquids! 
The students loved learning that bubbles are all spheres no matter how you create the bubble, whether it's with a straw, funnel, square, dinosaur cookie cutter, or a spatula! 
The Bubble Workshop is always full of fun and excitement! Below is a slideshow of our time with Miss. Stella from The Discovery Museums. 
Bubble Workshop 2015 by Slidely Slideshow

You can visit The Discovery Museums' website to explore more science fun at home with your student.

Has your student retold their Folktale to you?!

We sewed our mittens together.

Has your student retold you their Folktale yet? If not, ask them about it....they were wonderful!

As many of you remember, our kindergarten class has been focusing on learning how to retell stories which include characters, setting, problem/solution, and beginning/middle/end. We have ALSO been discussing Folktales and have learned that these stories often have many different versions of the same story. We talk about Folktales being passed down from generation to generation, so if your Papa told your mom a story, and your mom tells you, and then when you're grown up and tell the story to your child, will the story be the same? And the students know that of course it won't! 

After learning all of this, yesterday we were able to create our OWN version of The Mitten! Each student created their own mitten, five animal characters, and then retold their version of the story to a partner. I hope that they all came home to share their Folktale, The Mitten, with you!

We came up with our own characters, like these ones...a lion, a Chihuahua, and a cricket!

Then, the students put their mittens and characters together.....

And began to retell their own versions of the Folktale, The Mitten!

Their characters were so inventive. And, their story retelling skills are really wonderful to see! 

The version of The Mitten we have been reading a lot is Jan Brett's version read on YouTube below. Practice retelling the story after you watch the video at home!

Living Things Need Three Magic Things...

Happy New Year! I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday and have settled back into the routines of school and work.
We've begun our new science unit, Living Things and Non-Living Things, which we'll revisit many times throughout the remainder of the year. Last week, however, I asked the students
What are the three things ALL living things have in common?
I got lots and lots....and lots...of answers ranging from talking to walking to sleeping to eating pizza! But, in the end I told the students there are only THREE magic things any living thing needs in order to be alive and they are:
1. Water2. Food3. Air(MA Science Standards, Living Things/Biology, Characteristics of Living Things)
The students weren't totally sold, they thought that living things needed to talk (or bark or meow), but I asked them if a tree is alive. They all agreed that a tree, or any other plant, is alive but that it cannot talk. I asked them if trees could get up and walk to a sunnier side of the forrest, the answer to that one got lots of laughs and a few "nooooooo!"'s. 
Then we played a little game where we each got a card with a picture of either a living or non-living thing. 

Then, we began to categorize the cards in either living or non-living thing groups.

We figured out that worms are living things.

Books are NOT living things!

Each student got a chance to add a card to the categories and we came up with these groupings.

 The last card in the non-living things group can be tricky for some students to understand - sticks. When the inevitable question comes up that a stick is a tree that's alive, I ask them "but, is that stick on the ground still part of the tree that drinks water and food from the ground or breathes air through its leaves?" The kids then understand that sometimes living things become non-living things like the sticks, but a stick can never be a living thing again. Pretty heavy stuff for 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon!