Picnic Lunch

We couldn't have asked for a better day for our picnic lunch today!  We had 100% participation and the weather was beautiful.  The kiddos were so excited to have moms or dads or other visitors come and eat lunch with them.  Thank you so much for making the picnic so much fun for our Kindergartners!  I also need to thank you all for the amazing bouquets of flowers all over our classroom!  I sure am one lucky teacher to have so many thoughtful kids and families.  They are so nice and I really do appreciate them.  Here are a few pictures from our lunch together.

Insects Eat Too!

Today we learned that there are four different ways that insects eat.  Butterflies and bees have tongues that work like a straw to drink nectar.  Flies have a mouth like a sponge that soaks up food.  Mosquitos have a mouth like a needle and ants have pincher like mouths like a clothespin.  I set supplies at the kids tables and they got to pretend they were different insects.  We used large tweezers to pick up items like an ant.  They soaked water up with a sponge an drank with a straw.  They used a syringe to suck the water up like a mosquito.  We talked about what the different insects ate and why they had a special mouth to help them eat.  Then we learned how to draw each insect and created a book about how they ate. 

 

Insect Gallery Walk

Often when beginning a new unit, I like to find out what students already know about the concept or what questions they have.  A fun way to do this is a Gallery Walk.  I glued 6 different pictures of Insects to chart paper and put them at tables.  The children each had a marker and walked around to the tables.  They wrote down what they noticed, what they know, what they think and what they wonder.  After we gathered together and read over some of the things written on the paper.  The boys and girls had a great discussion about insects.  We used these posters to talk about what all of these insects have in common and some of their characteristics. 

Plant Tasting Party

After two weeks of learning about plants and how they grow, today we had the opportunity to eat several different parts of plants.  We set up a buffet in the cafeteria and divided all of the plants into groups.  There were seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flowers and fruit.  The children went down the line and helped themselves.  After they recorded what they ate and what they liked or did not like.  I was so proud of how adventurous they were!  Everyone was willing to try a bite of everything!

Earth Day

Today we celebrated Earth Day by learning of big and small ways that we can help take care of and protect our planet.  We read several stories and talked about what it means to reduce, reuse and recycle.  The boys and girls sorted pictures of different recyclables into the appropriate category, graphed thier results and then answered some questions about thier graph.  We listened to a song, "What a Wonderful World," and illustrated pictures for a book about the song.  In the afternoon, the kids were given plastic gloves and grocery bags and we went around Bemis and picked up garbage that we found.  We filled up almost 25 bags with paper, snack wrappers, cardboard and plastic water bottles.  Some of the girls from our class made up a Do Not Litter cheer.  We will spend the next few days talking about ways we can make the earth a cleaner and better place to live.