Every day is Earth Day!

This month, the class and I have been learning all about how to reduce, reuse, and recycle. One of the projects we did two weeks ago was take old newspapers from art class and rather than throwing them away, we drew self-portraits of ourselves on them. I love how each one has its own personality. Students also cut out pieces of blue and green images from magazines and Mrs. Paterson and I combined the colors together to make planet Earth. It turned into quite an eco-friendly class poster!

Last Thursday, the class rinsed out recyclables from the yellow plastics bin and transformed the garbage into treasure. Ideas included a robot, bird, hotel, drinking glass, funnel, spaceship, piggy bank, crown, planet Earth, and Mickey Mouse. My kindergartners are super creative! It is amazing what they can think of.

I took the class outside to check out the trees and see if and how they've changed in appearance since winter. We picked out a tree to observe and drew our observations in our science journal.

Other Happenings
The class is learning about nouns (person, place, or thing) and verbs (action words). They were even introduced to proper nouns (a specific person, place, or thing) and pronouns (she, you, they) through discussion. 

Ms. Pitala from Saint Kate's did a fun lesson with the class to show the difference between living vs. nonliving things. She's been emphasizing to them over the last two weeks that living things grow or change over time, reproduce, and need water, food, and air. She purchased these red fortune telling fish on Amazon and when you put them on the palm of your hand, they move due to your body heat. However, she didn't tell the kids that beforehand...shhh! She gave them magnifying glasses to check out the fish up close and then they all got to see what happened when the fish was placed on their palms. Their reactions were priceless! Afterwards they had to decide if the fish are living or nonliving based on their observations and state their reasons why they believe so. 

It doesn't reproduce.

It doesn't need anything and it has words on it and it is flat and it doesn't look real. 

It doesn't get air.

It can't breathe and it can't move.