Week 10

Happy Halloween! The class has been counting down to this day since we changed the calendar to October. Seems like just yesterday. Where did the month go?

This week, we reviewed the letters Aa and Pp.

Our sight words were "see" and "get".

Our close read this week was a fiction book called Pumpkin Town. We had lots of fun making predictions and inferences with this book.

Here is the vocabulary from this story.

We began learning about pumpkins and their life cycle. We even got to dissect a pumpkin flower and examine the pollen.

Some even chose to write about pumpkins during Daily 5.

The students have been working hard on their reading. We practice our sight words during our time with Mrs. Langham. We enjoyed stamping sight words this week.

Reading time is our favorite. We worked on a nonfiction book called pumpkins, which helped us to learn more about the pumpkin life cycle.

In math, we finished up our unit on the number line and took an assessment. We began learning about the number 6 and decomposing this number. The students are really starting to get the hang of this process, which will aide them when it is time for addition and subtraction facts. This was a fun book we read to introduce us to the number six.

In science, we began a unit on energy.

We practiced making energy with our bodies by doing 2 minutes of exercise and comparing our bodies before exercise and afterward. We were hot, sweaty and our heart was beating faster. Sorry for the blurry pictures, but they were in motion.

Another source of energy is light. 

We compared a dark room to a room that is lit. We talked about what body part we use to see light. We also talked about sources of light.

We had our first visit from Ms. Phillips, our counselor. She will come to visit our class every 3 weeks. She brought her friends, Can-Do and Will-Do with her.

We enjoyed some pumpkin and Halloween stories on Friday.

We made a fun craft too.

Week 9

We had a great week of learning in kindergarten. Fall is in the air and the carnival is on Saturday. The kids are full of excitement about the carnival and upcoming Halloween. Here is what we have been learning in our classroom this week.

This week, we reviewed the letters Hh and Tt.

Our sight words were "can" and "it".

Our close read this week was a National Geographic book, Bats.

Here are the vocabulary words from the story.

We learned so much about bats and many of us have seen the bats from the Congress Avenue bridge. We had lots to share about bats. We made a Venn diagram comparing bats to humans.

We also read a nonfiction book about bats.

This week, we helped set a world record by participating in Jumpstart's read for the record. Children all across the country read this book to help break the record.

In math, we have been counting and comparing numbers. We used unifix cubes to count and make trains. We then compared trains to see which number was bigger and then we counted on to see how much bigger that number was.

We learned all about the number 5 and the combinations of 5.

In science, we learned all about how heat and cooling can change the states of matter. We had fun with our ice ball experiment. We looked at frozen water balloons and observed the cracks and bubbles frozen inside. We dyed it with food color to help observe these more closely. We also added salt to our ice and learned that salt makes ice melt. We put it in water and observed that the ice floats. We also watched as our ice balloon changed from a solid to a liquid in the water throughout the day.

We observed solids changing into a liquid and then into a gas (water vapor). 

 We talked about the water cycle and observed how water condenses when gases change back to a liquid, just like precipitation.

 

We also observed how other things can change from a solid to a liquid when we add heat. We melted butter, chocolate and crayons.

Here are some of the books we read.

Objects change when heat is applied. We did a matching sort to see how the objects looked after we added heat.

We had a lot of fun mixing cake batter and adding heat to make cakes.

It was even more fun to eat them.