Ms Aja's Classroom

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Book Sharing

Each week every student takes home a bag full of books from our classroom library. Throughout the week we spend time enjoying these fiction and nonfiction books with family members. On Thursdays we return our book bags to school and have our book sharing circle.  In the sharing circle everyone has an opportunity to share a favorite book from the week.  Students give book recommendations to their friends and show specific parts of the story that they like.  Sometimes students share interesting facts that they learned from nonfiction books they read. Then students get to choose new books for their book bags for the upcoming week. Of course students frequently choose books that were recommended by their peers.  The book sharing circle encourages students to discuss favorite books and characters.  This is just one more way to help students share their excitement about reading.  We have a whole classroom full of readers!

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

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Counting Pennies

We have been collecting pennies for our Pennies for Peace drive. We are partnering with the Community School to raise money for schools in Pakistan. Collecting pennies has proved to be an authentic math activity. Each morning we count the pennies as we add them to the jar. Today we decided that it would save time to count the pennies by 10s instead of by 1s. Several students worked together to put the pennies in stacks of tens. Then we were able to count by tens to figure out that we brought in 357 pennies today. That’s $3.57!

Today we also spent time reading, drawing, writing, painting, building, playing, and collaborating. Ask your child what he/she worked on during classroom centers and creative play time today.

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

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Music Makers

Ms. Shelley came to make music with us today. We learned a new song and got to sing old favorites. We also got to use the rhythm sticks today.

Our buddies came to visit us today. We spent time enjoying good literature with our buddies.  Our buddies have been learning about the states of matter. They sang us a song about the three states of matter.  We discussed the differences between solids, liquids, and gases.  Then we watched as water changed from solid into liquid. We also did an experiment about condensation.  We put cold, green water in a cold cup.  We watched as condensation formed on the outside of the glass. To our surprise, the condensation was clear instead of green like the water inside the glass.  The water droplets did not seep through the glass as some of us hypothesized. Instead, the water vapor from the air condensed and became liquid after making contact with the cold glass. The scientific concepts of states of matter and condensation are rather abstract concepts. Our buddies did a great job giving us an introduction to these difficult scientific concepts.

Brendan recently went on a beach trip to Lincoln City. Today he showed us some neat treasures he found on the beach. His family found a beautiful blown glass ball and several different types of rocks and shells. We enjoyed examining these objects and asking Brendan questions about his beach trip. 

Joaquin brought in plastic cups last week for our 100th day celebration. We are still enjoying finding creative uses for these cups.  Several students worked together to create this pyramid structure with the cups. We had to use teamwork, balance, and precision to create our pyramid.

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

Monday, February 22, 2010

Sleeping Plants

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

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Happy Birthday Lily

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

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

100th Day Celebration

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

Valentines Day

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

Baking Valentines Cookies

This year, as a special gesture of friendship, the classes at the ELC decided to bake each other valentines cookies.  The Whales decided to bake sugar cookies for the preschool Dolphins’ class. On Thursday Ms. Stephanie came in to help us the bake the sugar cookies. We have become very skilled bakers since our bread unit.  We are able to read recipes, measure out ingredients, and work together to create yummy treats. Our bakers are learning the difference between tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups.  We are also learning to compare fractions (for instance two half cups equals a whole cup). 

View more photos from last week in our Feb 8-12 Photo Gallery

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Friendship Cards

Today was a whirlwind of learning and fun.  This morning we got our school photos taken and we spent the day working on special projects for our friendship celebration on Friday. We worked hard at writing special messages for our friends and decorating cards for our friends. During Writers’ Workshop we discussed what it means to write from other perspectives. Several of us wrote stories from the perspective of animals today. 

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Buddies

This morning we had music with Ms. Shelley. We got to use the egg shakers and we sang Are You Sleeping in different languages. We also sang in “teams” doing a call and response activity.

Our buddies visited us today! We spent time reading with big buddies. Then our buddies helped us paint murals of different animal habitats.

This afternoon Joaquin showed us his tap shoes. We can’t wait to see him do a tap performance for us sometime!

VIew more photos from today in our Feb 8-12 Photo Gallery

Monday, February 08, 2010

Authors’ Celebration

This morning we began discussing ways in which animals deal with the harsh winter weather. Today we discussed animals that migrate south in the winter. We read a story about migration and watched a video about butterflies migrating. Then we played a migration game. Mr. Danny called out a season and the “birds” in the room would migrate north or south depending on the season.

All last week we worked very hard to turn our stories into published pieces.  Today we celebrated at our Authors’ Celebration. We started the celebration with our Authors’ Circle where each author read a favorite page of their story to the group.  Then we split off into pairs to read our whole story to each other.  We switched partners several times so we got to hear several stories and share our own story with several friends. Then we met in our classroom library where we applauded as each author added his/her book to our classroom library. We ended the celebration with a special toast. We are authors!

This afternoon we began making valentines for our friends. We used markers, glitter, and paint to create special cards and messages.

View more photos from today in our Feb 8-12 Photo Gallery

Creative Play and Book Boxes

Last week flew by! Many of us were very busy trying to get well and stay well. We have been taking extra care to wash our hands and cough/sneeze into our elbows. We want to keep all of our friends healthy so that we can play together at school each day. Here are some highlights of last week:

We started our individual book boxes. Each day we spend time reading special books from our book boxes.  These books are beginning reader books, which contain simple texts with sight words and words that can be sounded out.

We started discussing the different seasons and why we have different seasons.  We also began thinking about why animals might have difficulties finding food in the winter. To illustrate this point we gave each student a piece of pineapple that was frozen in an ice cube. Students tried various strategies to get to their chunk of pineapple. We discovered that it’s very difficult to eat food that is frozen and we discussed how animals might have a similar problem getting food in winter when things are frozen outside. Soon we will begin discussing ways animals deal with the harsh winter weather (adaptation, migration, hibernation, etc.). 

We had a music makers session with Ms. Shelley on Tuesday. We sang songs, did movement activities, and played instruments.

We began getting ready for our authors’ celebration. We read through all the writing pieces in our writing folders. Then we each selected a favorite piece to publish.  We talked about the process authors go through to publish their writing. We worked hard to edit and add pages to our stories. We added to our illustrations and designed special covers for our stories.

Of course we spent time playing and exploring in the Atelier and in Creative Play. In Creative Play we have been making animal habitats and role-playing animal behaviors.  The Creation Station has been very popular and several scientists have been hard at work making new inventions. Last week we even designed, tested, and modifed “launchers”. 

Best of all, we spent time enjoying our friends and the beautiful Oregon sunshine!

View more photos from last week in our Feb 1-5 Photo Gallery

Monday, February 01, 2010

Animals in Winter

Dear Families,
Today me and Brendan played Harry Potter outside. We are going to play Harry Potter every single day we meet each other. That even means during creative play, atelier, and every single recess.
LOVE,
bat man!!!

This week we are starting a new theme: Animals in Winter. We were delighted to find several animal costumes and an assortment of fabric in the Creative Play room today! These costumes and fabrics will allow us to turn into different types of animals as we learn about how different species prepare for winter.

We had lots to talk about during calendar time today since it’s a new month. We discussed upcoming holidays and birthdays in February. We labeled the dates on our February calendar and wrote up other special events such as book bags and buddies. We decided that February is a very tricky month to spell since the word does not look the way it sounds. We skip-counted by 5s and 10s today as we figured out that we had been in school for 90 days so far. We also got to add a tally to our tooth chart since Isabela lost a tooth over the weekend!

Jack wrote an interesting story about a Lego creation that he made. He shared a photo of his creation with the class using the SMART Board.

View more photos from today in our Feb 1-5 Photo Gallery