Brrrr...it's cold outside.

In science, we've been talking about hibernation, what kinds of animals hibernate, and what kind of homes they make during the long winter season. Bears sleep in dens, chipmunks dig burrows underground, frogs cover themselves in mud, and bats hibernate in big groups inside caves. I challenged the class to put themselves in those animals' places: If you had to create a home to stay warm in, what would you use? How would you build it? On Monday, we drew rough draft sketches in our science journal. Then on Tuesday, we ventured outside near Chickadee Landing and got to building!

One of the biggest challenges for my students was using only items from nature to build with, such as leaves, tall grass, sticks, snow, and ice. I discussed how some animals have sharp claws or strong legs to help them build their home so we also used tools (tongs, big spoons) to help us scoop and dig. It was fun to see the class work in small groups or independently. Some had a plan right away while others tried different methods before deciding what was successful. When they were satisfied with their home, we used thermometers to measure the temperature inside their homes. I used my phone to take the air temperature. We compared the two numbers to see if their animal home was warmer or colder than the temperature surrounding their home. 

In writing, I introduced capitalizing the first word in the sentence as well as special names of things (proper nouns). We made a list of ordinary words vs special words. Special words consisted of names of people, places, days, and months. I also emphasized that if a word is capitalized, the FIRST letter of the word should be the only thing that is capitalized and the other letters need to be lowercase. It is typical in kindergarten for them to have mixed letters in their writing--capital and lowercase letters. In our stages of writing, they are ready to focus on what letters need to be capitalized and which ones should be lowercase. They continue to use finger spaces in their writing, spell sight words correctly, and use ending marks at the end of their sentences.