Happy Mother's Day!

A big shout-out to all you AMAZING, MOTIVATING, SELFLESS, and CARING mothers! Being a mom is such a gift. The class worked very hard last week on putting together their gifts for you. One of them included a book written and illustrated by the kids about their moms.

The other gift was a self portrait of mom.

I hope you had an amazing day and were able to celebrate with loved ones.

What have we been up to lately?
In Science...
Our Eco Star Ms. Pitala finished teaching us about living and nonliving things. During one of our morning meetings, we did a greeting where she gave each student a picture and once everyone had one, they had to walk around and find their matching animal. One of the cards was a baby animal and its matching card was the adult animal. This learning activity helped show students that living things grow and change over time.

Ms. Pitala took the class outside for an outdoor scavenger hunt for living and nonliving things. Students looked for items on their checklist and wrote down what exactly they found that fits the category. One student wrote down "Ms. Joachim" for something that is moving. I thought that was pretty clever!

  

In science, I have been teaching the class about plants and their different parts. We made a flip book to show what we know.

We are currently doing an experiment with celery stalks and colored water to show how plants' stems drink water. As the week went on, the colored water eventually made its way to the top of the celery's leaves. Pretty cool!

Students made predictions beforehand and wrote what they thought would happen. "I think it is going to do nothing because it doesn't have soil or roots."

I think it will stay the same because there's no roots and no space and no light.

Our maple tree syrup from tapping in March was made at Wozupi Farms and delivered to school. The kindergarten and third grade classes were able to enjoy a pancake breakfast with our authentic syrup. The majority of kids enjoyed it; only a few were iffy on it.

In language arts...
The class learned what verbs are. Each student made a page of an animal doing an action word and the pages were put together to make a class book.

Two weeks ago, the weather was dark, rainy, and wet. I read the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs then had the class come up with what they wished it could rain if it could rain ANYTHING. The results were cute! We are continuing to work on capitalizing the first word in the sentence, using finger spaces in between each word, and using correct punctuation.

We were able to enjoy the warm weather last week and decided to do independent reading outdoors.

Speaking of being outside, during one of our playtimes, the class and I were out exploring by the pond when some of the kids found a robin's nest where we like to climb up some of the branches. I told the class that while the eggs are beautiful to look at, we can't touch them or the nest. I hope to be able to come back there in the next week or so and see if they've hatched!

Also, after school one day, some of the Kids Company kids found a snapping turtle out by the baseball field. I had never seen one up close like that before! How awesome it is that Jeffers Pond has all of this right in its backyard? We are so fortunate!

In math..
The kindergartners learned about GROWING patterns where it starts off with a certain number and keeps getting better. 2 -- 4 --- 6 -- 8 would be an example of a growing pattern. Students were paired off and worked together to illustrate their own growing patterns. Most of them were +1 or +2.

Here's a +1 pattern

Here's a +2 pattern

A big big BIG thank you to all of you who showed me LOVE for Teacher Appreciation Week. I received so many drawings, cards, and goodies last week. I think I have enough Starbucks gift cards to last me until the last day of school...phew! You are seriously the BEST families to work with.

It was funny--so with those Eileen's Colossal Cookies, I showed the class the cute decorations and told them that if I had enough for all 23 of them, I'd share. One student raised his hand and said, "Well technically Ms. Joachim, you could cut them into small slices and get enough for everyone to have a piece." Challenge accepted smart boy. I mean, honestly, I'd feel really really guilty eating a whole box of sugar cookies to myself (although it'd be so so so good...for a couple minutes), so I was more than happy to share the goodness with the class. I made a BIG deal out of it too saying that I don't just share my favorite sugar cookies from Eileen's with just ANYONE...only to those I love. And I do, really truly, love each and every one of my students. Sniff sniff...they are my purpose in my life!

I love you all! You make my job so complete and so happy and so fulfilling. :) I am really going to cherish these last few weeks with the class and will try to be a big, brave teacher and not get too sad when it's time to let them go.