Plants, Seeds and Wiggly Worms!

All last week we took the Stanford Achievement Test.  In the afternoon, we needed a brain break so we had a ton of fun learning about plants.
Monday

We learned about the parts of the plant
and the job(s) each part played in the
growth of the plant.  We made our
brace map then we learned
Dr. Jean's Parts of a Plant song!





Tuesday
Using our handprints, we created sunflowers that were the same size as us and labeled the parts.  We hung them on the walls of the cafeteria ramp.

 Wednesday
On to the wiggly worms...first a schema chart before reading Wonderful Worms...

Then a fun gummy worm addition and subtraction game!
















Thursday
My favorite activity all year...our "wormology" lesson.  I gave each student a Canadian Nightcrawler to make and record observations about!

Friday
We planted grass seed to make a Mr. or Mrs. Grass Head.  Students journaled about their growth each day as part of their morning work.

Our Grass Heads a week later!

Going buggy!

Our class had so much fun learning about insects!  Here's a few of our activities:

We started out with discussing what makes an insect an insect and labeling the parts.  I did one on on chart paper while the students did one for their F.Y.I. folder.  

Practicing counting phonemes and syllables in a given word.  Students were given a target word, stretched the word out and placed one flower for each phoneme on their mats, then clapped the same word and placed ladybugs on their mats to represent the number of syllables.

Retelling The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Charting the life cycle of the caterpillar before creating one on our own.

 

Helping my kinder'garden' bloom...

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Whatever the Weather...

"Wow...weather is so cool!"

That's a quote from one of my kiddos.  We did have an amazing time studying what weather is and different types of weather, while throwing in some activities based around an amazing classic movie...:O)

 Our week began with studying precipitation.  We made a schema chart to show the types we knew.

  

 Then I posed the question "How did the water get into the clouds to be able to fall as precipitation?".  Several students knew that it came from the water that is on the ground.  This lead into a discussion of the water cycle.  This is the chart we made to show our new learning.

                                                            

We practiced reciting the parts of the cycle by learning Dr. Jean's Water Cycle song.  The students made flip books showing each part on a different card then bound them with a chenille stem "ring" so that they could go the cycle unendingly just like the real thing.  (I didn't get a picture though :( )

Our next topic was rainbows.  The students learned how rainbows were made and made a drawing of Roy G. Biv, a man with rainbow colored hair to help us remember the order.  One student asked if he was still alive!  Hehe...every person we seem to study is from long ago!!  That afternoon, we discussed creating a mental image and listened to the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with our eyes closed so we could get a picture in our minds of what we would see if we went over the rainbow.

                                                    

The students then wrote about their mental image. I encouraged them to use a lot of color and detail, just like what Dorothy saw in Oz.

Over the rainbow I saw the whole town.  I saw everything.

Over the rainbow I saw the good witch.

One of our state standards requires that students identify wind as moving air.  We read The Wind Blew and discussed how wind can vary in strength.  One of the most fascinating (to them) variation of wind was a tornado (they preferred to call it a twister).  The students made tornadoes in a bottle and had a blast trying to make the tornado whirl inside.  Many figured out doing the "Doennig" clap would help them achieve this!

Imagine 16 kids with bottles in the middle of the carpet swinging their arms over the head and of course chanting "woot!  woot!)!  Too funny!!

The student then wrote what would happen if a tornado came. This time I encouraged more of a bland color scheme, like the beginning scenes of "The Wizard of Oz".

A tornado came and struck my house.

Here's how we showcased our awesome writing from the past few days.

Our final topic for our weather study was clouds.  That morning we played a phoneme counting game with a cloud mat and used raindrops to show how many sounds we heard.  During our discussion about how clouds are made, several students made the connection that clouds are the condensation part of the water cycle...YEAH!!

Our weather study was not complete however without a little fun!  On Friday we made ruby slippers (or sneakers for the boys) and wrote about where they would take us.  These were added to the outside of our twister/rainbow bulletin board. 

I would go to a secret place.

I would go to Milwaukee and Minnesota.