Today Mr. Mark visited our classroom.  He went with us on a tour of our secret garden and showed us all the work he’s been doing to get our gardens ready for spring. ELC students worked together last year to create the secret garden and plant a variety of fragrant plants. We discussed how the plants in the garden are still alive, but they are “sleeping” during the winter; similar to how some animals hibernate. The plants will be ready to wake up in the spring time, but in the meantime we need to keep them safe.  We posted sleeping plant signs in our gardens to remind friends to use care around our sleeping plants. Thank you for all your help, Mr. Mark!

Today the Sharks’ buddy class from the community school visited our classroom. They did a short skit about the Pennies for Peace drive we are starting this week. We read Listen to the Wind (the children’s version of Three Cups of Tea) last week and discussed how some children in Pakistan do not have school buildings or supplies. We are working together to collect pennies for schools in Pakistan. Please remember to send in your pennies this week if you would like to be a part of the penny drive!

View more photos from today in our Feb 22-26 Photo Gallery

This week we got to celebrate Lily’s birthday. We presented her with a handmade card and sang happy birthday. We ate yummy treats and got to play outside with our friends. We are so glad that Lily is a part of our classroom community!

We continued learning about what animals do in winter. We also began discussing ways that humans impact animals and how we can help animals during the winter time.  We went on a nature walk to collect data about the ways humans impact animals. We noticed that buildings built by humans decrease the amount of nature left for animal habitats. When humans leave trash on the ground it can hurt animals. We also noticed ways that humans help animals by putting up bird feeders and by preserving nature areas.

We discussed ways that squirrels adapt to winter weather. For instance, squirrels store up acorns and other food to eat during the winter months. We did a mapping activity where we hid acorns around the classroom and marked their locations on a classroom map. We are learning how to read and use maps for a variety of purposes.

We spent time engineering and designing structures out of a variety of materials.

We had a Lego Club meeting this week.  Several engineers had noticed that there were some problems with Lego usage in our classroom. Lego structures were getting broken and pieces were missing. During the meeting the engineers decided to reorganize our classroom shelves and give each engineer a larger, more easily accessible space on which to store his/her Lego structures. We decided that we would try having engineers save their Lego structures for as long as they want, as long as the structures fit on each engineer’s “save spot”. We will meet again in a week to see if these solutions are working for everyone.

Of course we also spent time outside enjoying the beautiful sunshine and enjoying our special friendships this week.

View more photos from this week in our Feb 16-19 Photo Gallery

We have been diligently recording and keeping track of how many days of school we’ve had.  Today we got to celebrate our 100th day of school! Can you believe that we’ve been in kindergarten for 100 days now? To celebrate we got to do a variety of fun centers, all involving the number 100.  At one center we were using our art skills to decorate 100th day hats while at another center we created Fruit Loop necklaces using our skills to count by 10s to 100.  We served ourselves special snacks, carefully counting out 100 pieces of food.  We also did different exercises in sets of 100. 

Several friends brought in collections of 100 things from home.  We had collections of Legos, cereal, pennies, cotton balls, cups, berries, and more.

We ended the celebration by eating our yummy snacks and watching a slideshow of 100 pictures from our first 100 days of kindergarten. We look forward to many more fun memories this year!

View more photos from today in our Feb 16-19 Photo Gallery

On Friday we had a special visitor in our classroom. Brendan’s grandma came to visit all the way from Michigan. She shared information and books about Michigan with the class. We learned that Michigan is similar to Oregon in a lot of ways! There are also some differences between the two states.

Friday morning we finished writing valentine cards to our friends and we decorated individual envelopes that we could use to collect our valentines. Then we passed out our valentines to all of our friends.

In the afternoon we had our friendship/Valentines Day celebration. We started the celebration by decorating the sugar cookies that we baked for the Dolphins’ class. We put a lot of care into decorating our yummy cookies!

After decorating our cookies we gathered with the whole school community to watch a Charlie Brown movie. Then we presented our sugar cookies to the Dolphins. The Sharks gave us some chocolate chip cookies. Thank you, Sharks!

We ended our valentines celebration with the friends in our classroom community. We enjoyed eating the chocolate chip cookies from the Sharks while we read all our special valentines from our friends.  Each valentine we received was handmade and contained a personalized message from a classmate. Ask your child to show you his/her valentines. The valentines contain wonderful compliments and memories that classmates wanted to share with your child!

We have developed some great friendships in our community so far this year! We enjoyed taking some time to celebrate those friendships and let our friends know how much they mean to us this week.
View more photos from last week in our Feb 8-12 Photo Gallery