We have butterflies!

It was exciting to see that 4 out of our 10 butterflies have emerged from their chrysalides.  We are hopeful that in the next day or so the rest will come out!  

Today we talked about what a community is: a group of people who live and work together and the community helpers work to make our communities cleaner, safer and better.  I read the book Whose Tools are These? and students had to guess which community helper used which tools to make their job easier to do.

In Math we used cubes to make different combinations of 10. 

LOTS of updates!

Last week sure was busy!  Today we were excited to come in and see that our caterpillars have formed chrysalises!  We moved them into the butterfly habitat and expect to have them turn into butterflies in 7-10 days.  Many of the sunflowers we planted last week have also started to sprout.  Here are also some photos from our trip to Shelburne Farms.  It was a fun day and MANY thanks to those families that joined us!

Planting Sunflowers

This morning Christine Gall from the Burlington School Food Project visited and taught us about how plants grow.  She turned one of our students into a seed and taught us how plants start as a seed and then grow roots and a sprout with space, water and sunlight.  She also brought some sunflower seeds and students were able to plant their own sunflower.  We will watch how they begin to grow over the coming weeks!

We have also been hard at work on subtraction.  Yesterday students used personal white boards to write number sentences for subtraction stories I read aloud.  They did an AWESOME job!  Today we worked on filling out number bonds and take away problems when using 6 as our whole.

Special visitors in the woods

Today we entered the woods very quietly as we heard there was a family of ducks in the vernal pool.  We were able to see them for minute before they flew off.  Some of us also saw a wolf spider!  It was the biggest spider most of us have ever seen.  We did a little research and learned wolf spiders, similar to bees, only attack when they feel threatened.  They'll bite and while it will probably hurt a bit it is not too dangerous.

We also had our annual Rock Paper Scissors Tournament.  Tres was the rep from our class and Ms. Kavanaugh from the library was ultimately victorious.  Thanks to Ace Hardware for their donation of popcorn! 

Special Delivery...

A second post to announce a special delivery: CATERPILLARS!  I told the students we would be getting a special fragile package and we made some predictions: a glass jar, a hamster and a glass figurine of me (haha!) to name a few!  They were happy to see that inside were painted lady caterpillars.  We took a picture and added some notes describing what the caterpillars looked like today...

Be on the lookout for updates!

   

Austin's Butterfly

Yesterday during Writer's Workshop we started working on revision and writing multiple drafts.  I showed this video "Austin's Butterfly" to model how to go about giving feedback and also that it's okay to be honest and get advice on how to make our work even better.  We create a chart together "criteria for success" (or how to do our best work) and all of these criteria were what kindergartners told me a writer needs to do.  They are truly amazing!  We are using this criteria for our writing and as suggestions to give each other feedback.  The goal is that everyone will have a typed published book to share in a couple of weeks! 

 

Linus the Minus

Happy Monday!  This morning after some time outside we read the May "Chicken Soup with Rice" poem and worked on building words with -ay.

In May
I truly think it best
To be a robin
Lightly dressed
Concocting soup
Inside my nest.
Mix it once
Mix it twice
Mix that chicken soup
With rice.

I read the book The Bumble Bee Queen and we continued talking about why bees are so important!  Did you know that a worker bee makes only about 1 spoonful of honey in its lifetime and that in order to make one jar of honey about 2 million flowers must be visited!?

During Math we read a poem about "Linus the Minus" and talked about how when we take away you end up with less.  

More signs of Spring!

Kindergarten was VERY happy to see the sun shining this afternoon!  There have been lots of signs of springs popping up including lots of worms on the playground.

This morning we worked on using parts of words to create new words.  We started with is and I changed the ending to make: in, it, if.  I did the same with at to make: am, an, and as well as cat into can, cap.  I finished reading The Secret Pool and we worked on more addition stories during math: if there is a bowl of 8 jelly beans at a birthday party and some are red and some are green what different combinations can I make?  We also learned a new math card game: Snap! that you could play at home: Snap!