Have a Great Summer!

I say this every year, but this school year flew by!  It seems like I was just greeting your kiddos for the first time and now I am getting ready to say goodbye and send them on to be big first graders!  This has truly been a special year and I have loved having each and every kiddo in our class.  Each child brought something special to the group and will be missed so much!  I want to thank all of the families for being so wonderful to work with and supportive.  It takes a village to raise a child and the best thing we can do for these kids is work together.  It was a joy working with all of you.  I am sad to see the kids move on, but excited for all they have in store for them!  Please enjoy your summer and come back to visit in the fall!

Shaving Cream Fun!

As the school year winds down, we have been doing lots of fun end of the year activities.  Children have gone on scavenger hunts with their buddies, read their book boxes outside, and cleaned the tables with shaving cream.  This is always a favorite thing for kiddos to do- because they can get messy- while helping to clean our tables at the same time!  We ahd fun drawing and writing words in the shaving cream.  Our tables look sparkling clean now too!

Boulan Buddies & Zoo Activities

This week, our Boulan Buddies planned and ran our buddy activity.  This activity allowed our middle school students to plan work for younger students, gather materials, and successfully implement five game stations.  As the middle schoolers are working on leadership skills and taking initiative, our outdoor stations were a great culmative assignment as we only have one more Boulan buddy meeting left for the year!  Here are some pictures of the students participating in the activities below:

As we are preparing for the Zoo, students have been completing several Zoo activities varying from Zoo books and zoo poems to zoo art, and zoo math to help prepare for our trip!  Today, each child should have brought home a 3D Monkey project. The children had fun reinacting life as a money in class today.  Make sure your child shows you their craft if they haven't already!

Pretend Play & 4th Grade Buddies!

Since this is the last full month of school, it is a time for many LASTS...including the last pretend play of the year.  This week, students arrived to see The Bemis Zoo right in our very own classroom!  The class has enjoyed pretending to be Zoo animals as well as imagining their own lives as Zookeepers.  This also helps us in our preparation for our own trip to the Detroit Zoo!

We also met with our 4th grade buddies in Mrs. Clay's classroom.  The 4th graders shared their "Diary of....(Bug name)" to us based on the story Diary of A Worm. We then shared our informational writing pieces, "All About..." with our buddies too!

Upland Hills Farm Field Trip

Thank you to all of our parents who attended our field trip to the Upland Hills Farm.  We had a wonderful day together and the students all had a blast!  Thank you for helping as our students create life-long memories!  Here our some pictures to highlight our trip:

Planting Lima Beans!

On Monday, the students had the chance to put the plant life cycle into action!  To help end our unit of study on plants, each child recieved their own cup, filled it with soil, added two lima beans, and watered their plant.  Throughout the week, children have been watching their plants, looking for signs of plant growth.  When they bring these home, continue to water them and make sure they have sunlight.  I asked the students to report back to class every so often on how their plants are doing!

Learning About Plants!

This week, our focus was on learning about the Life Cyle of Plants.  Students were asked to look at a group of pictures and decide which were plants and which were not plants.  We discovered that plants were often green in color, need sun and water to live, and are living and grow.  We also compared our own life cycle as humans to the life cycle of a plant.  Students learned that flowers start as a seed, grow into a stem, then grow leaves, then flowers, and sometimes, fruit.  We will continue our unit next week as students have the opportunity to watch their own plants grow. 

Students completed a sunflower project with our Boulan Buddies this week. We talked about the parts of sunflowers (stem, flower, leaves, seed, roots) etc. and compared them to other types of plants.

We also drew our own flowers and labeled them with their appropriate parts!