Monthly Archives: September 2011
Sinking and Floating
Because we are going to be going on our field trip to the pumpkin patch/apple orchard later this week, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce sinking and floating to my students. You might ask what these two things have in common…
This wee we have been talking/learning about apples so once we get back from the orchard, we will be “testing” our apples in different ways including seeing if they float or sink. We will also try the same thing with different sized pumpkins the following week.
Here is the sheet I created for our Science notebooks: (We filled in the Prediction side before we got any materials out–however, I did show the children what each material looked like before we predicted)
Here are some pictures of the great experiment:
This was one of those lessons when I had a great idea of the direction we were headed and after looking at the cups of water and 24 children, my directions suddenly changed so that this experiment would be more “controlled”. I placed each cup of water on a tray and then assigned specific materials to each child to place in the water. I led the class like this…, “If you have the crayon, please place it in the water now”….wait 30 seconds to watch what happens…”If you put the crayon in the water, please remove it now”. Then we continued with all the other items, one at a time. This way prevented all the items from going in at once and from the kids fighting over which person got to put what item into the water. There are 8 items on the sheet, so at my tables of 4 each child was responsible for 2 items. After we were all cleaned up, the children brought their science journals (with this page glued in) to the floor and we discussed the results and marked them accordingly on our charts.
Kristen 🙂
Monarchs
Check out this picture I just found from Muncie, IN (go Cards!) with a monarch butterfly and a hummingbird in the picture:
I found this on the Journey North website!
Kristen 🙂
Monarch Butterflies
We’ve started our study of Monarch Butterflies again this year and have already talked about the mystery of their yearly journey to Mexico, their life cycle, and a song about them. We’ve also created our symbolic monarchs to mail to Mexico for the overwintering period of our year. The children each colored a life sized monarch:
We’ve also read several books about them:
Kristen 🙂
P.S. If you haven’t checked out the website Journey North, you need to! You can study the migration/hibernation of all kinds of plants and animals with your students. It’s free and has everything you need!
Science Journals
We’ve been doing some work in our Science Journals and I thought I would show you some examples from a variety of students in my classroom. All of the ideas/recording sheets I came up with and I will eventually be sharing them on my blog…
Kristen 🙂
Race to 10
Here is a simple game I came up with this week (I’ve probably read about it somewhere a long time ago and then just remembered it, so I’m not sure if I was the one who actually made it up!! 🙂 ). We called it Race to 10. I created a simple 10 frame in Word and made a copy for each child. Each child also got ten cubes and they shared a die (to encourage turn taking!).
They rolled the die and put that number of cubes on their ten frame. Then their partner took a turn. They repeated this process until each one of them had filled their ten frame up. Later, we will use the overage (numbers past ten) to fill up another ten frame, but for right now we are just working on numbers to ten.
Each day before math work stations but after calendar, we play a new game like this one that then gets added (eventually) to a math work station tub. We play for about 15 minutes and then have math work stations for 30ish minutes.
Kristen 🙂
Videos
I’ve added a tab at the top with videos (mainly from YouTube) that I have pre-screened for children to watch. I’ll keep adding videos as I find them so be sure to check back soon!
Kristen 🙂
Math Common Core Standards Grant
I wrote a grant not too long ago and had it funded last week. Here are the materials that we received:
Kristen 🙂
More Math Work Stations
Here are the last three Math Work Stations (for this “round”). We will start using them on Thursday this week.
The children will read the story (after I’ve read it to them several times) and place a cube on each number after reading about that caterpillar in the book (Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin Jr.).
This is an activity I just got from Lakeshore. The children roll the blue die and build the shape that comes up. There is a “3D Shape” bubble on one side of the die and if the children land on that they are supposed to build a 3D version of the shape the roll. I can see that working better later in the year, so for right now, I think if the children roll 3D Shape, they can just choose a shape the would like to build (unless they want to build a 3D shape).
The 12th tub (we have 24 students) will be the students using IXL. IXL is a math program my school uses to help supplement math instruction. Two children a day (as with all the tubs) will be using IXL and be working on items related to our Common Core Standards in Math.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Here is what I did with the printables from DLTK Teach’s website:
I printed them out, laminated two sets of them and created cards to match each picture. Partners will each use one set of these at Pocket Chart Work Station and match the picture to the word while putting the story in order. We will read the story 10-15 times this week and a copy of the book is always available for the children to use to reference if they need to.
Kristen's Kindergarten 