EE Fest

It's For the Birds
Last week was all about birds in science. On Thursday, we had a naturalist named Valerie from Three Rivers Park District come in and teach the class about birds. We learned about their different body parts (wings, talons/claws, beak, eyes) and got to meet two special birds!

Our friend Olivia J. is dressed up as a bird!

We got to touch a bird's foot!

In class, we created our own birds.

Environmental Education Fest
We had a wet and rainy EE Fest on Friday. It amazed me how much the kindergartners didn't mind the pouring rain. They were so engaged with the different activities and I never heard anyone complain about the rain for the entire day--it was amazing! For my session, the classes learned about birds' beaks and used a variety of tools (chop sticks, tweezers, clothes pins, paper bags, etc) to grab different pieces of food. Mrs. Seidensticker showed students how to make a birds' nest, Mrs. Alpaugh took the kids bird watching with binoculars in the woods, and Mrs. Gerdes' guest teacher taught them how to make gliders similar to birds' wings. 

Eagles getting meat

Looking for bugs

Owls catching "flies"

Hummingbirds sucking nectar

Woodpeckers pecking for bugs in trees

Robins getting worms

Reading
The class has been learning how to read with expression and putting themselves in the characters' shoes. During one lesson, I gave students sticky notes and they had to write a talking or thinking bubble above the characters. They had to think, "What would he/she say or think? How are they feeling?"

We wrapped up our fairy tale-themed stations in reading.

Rhyming words

Adding Super E at the end of words

Real vs silly words

Sentence writing

Word families

Because of the rainy weather last week, I thought it would be fun to read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs to the class and do a writing extension off of the book.

I wish it would rain watermelon because it is sweet and I love them.

I wish it would rain puppies because they are cute and I would hold them.

I wish it would rain bacon because I want it to fall on my head.

The students used my special pink chair to read their writing to the class. Everyone got a chance to share!

Math
We've been using different units of measurement--time (to the hour and half hour), inches, centimeters, and rulers! 

Here we are using yellow centimeter cubes to measure length.

We used square inch tiles to measure these pictures.

We worked on estimating and how it is a smart guess. Many students want their estimations to be exactly right! I encouraged the class that estimations are numbers that are close to the exact measurement--and sometimes their estimations and the actual measurements match.

We traced our feet and compared the sizes.