Rocks, soil and water!

 We started out our exploration by looking at lots of different types of rocks.  Those hand lenses are amazing and just think if they were actually used correctly!!!

 We thought of lots of adjectives to describe our rocks.

 This is the bucket of rocks I got from attending a workshop at Region 14 one summer.  There are some real pretty rocks in this bucket!!

I sent this form home for homework.  Almost every child brought a rock back and we are going to experiment with them on Thursday.

 We watched Magic School Bus Rocks and Rolls.  It was about a statue that was eroded by the water.  We put 3 "sugar cube" rocks in a jar and we shook it for the wind.  It began to erode into sand!!

We made some addition problems with some rocks in one hand and more rocks in the other hand.  We wrote an addition sentence to match our picture.

We are starting new BUILDing Mathematicians boxes.  These are the two boxes for Books about math.  One box has several books about math and the other is a book called Changes, Changes.  I put small blocks in that tub.

The Using manipulatives tubs have a die to roll and add that many ring a jings to make a tower.  The other tub has triangles to stick together to form shapes.

Independent work is all about making patterns.  One is a potholder frame and the student makes a pattern with the loops.  The other tub is a monster stamp and an ink pad for monster patterns.  The kids choose the pattern.

Learning about numbers tubs are cookie sheets with magnetic numbers to manipulate and a 12 inch foot to measure and record things with.

Doing math is sorting and grouping and maybe making patterns with math toys or wait I mean manipulatives.  The kids are not supposed to know they are learning by play! 

Turkeys and more turkeys

We are making long legged turkeys and the kids did a great job of fanfolding the paper! 

We came up with some ways to catch a turkey.  The kids were very creative!

Turkeys can be disguised as all kinds of things.  Mrs. Voss's class did these turkeys as a home project and they are adorable.

We graphed who would eat turkey and 3 kids chose to eat something else...like pizza.

 We sorted words by how many syllables they had.

We also cut out the correct number of feathers to add these turkeys for the hallway.

 Mrs. Shelton's class has made a mural of Indians with lots of practice on making patterns.  We thought they knew patterns and they can say them great but when it comes to showing the patterns on paper, we were surprised that they could not reproduce them!  So Mrs. Shelton found some very creative ways to show patterns!

These are our Indian boys and the girls colored and cut girls.

 We are still talking about fall and harvest.  This is a scarecrow book where the children read the color words to know what color the hat, shirt, pants and boots are.  It is a good review of color words.

 This is a letter book we do every week for the letter of the week.  The children code the book by circling the beginning of the sentence in green (for go), and the end of the sentence is red (for stop).  The word for the letter of the week (this week is f) and highlighted in yellow.  They read the book and code the words.  These books are sent home in a reading folder and when they are returned, we put them in a book box.

 This scarecrow has sight words on him.  We rolled a dice and then colored the word that was showing.  It took several tries to finally get all the words.

This is our letter detective work fromKindergartenwork's Detective Read and Write the Room.  The students are sneaky, quiet detectives looking for clues and words that start with the letter of the week.  They love it.

 We made a pie graph on who likes to eat turkey.  Three students wanted pizza instead!  The kids made a small pie graph using this as an example.

 This is a graph from Mrs. Shelton's class.  She used graph club which is a program on our computer.

Mrs. Shelton's class rolled a dice and colored a turkey that color and then collected all the data to make a fantastic bar graph!

 These are the literacy tubs for my class this week.  This is a play doh activity.  The kids make a pancake and then use letter stamps to make a word.

 This is a Christmas activity.  This tub is Bingo.  It is very hard for a Kindergartener to take a turn and then wait for his or her friends to have a turn.  But when they get the concept, life will be wonderful!!

This is a visual discrimination activity.  There are four different sets to choose from.  Once they match the set, they put it back in the bag and get another set to match.

In this tub, the students select a card and put a clip on the word they think it is.  They can turn the card over to see if the clip is on the smiley face sticker.  Then they copy the word on a piece of paper.

Literacy tubs and spiders

This was the last set of tubs for this six weeks but we have been collecting ideas for the third six weeks and will get the tubs all changed out this afternoon and be ready to work on them on Monday.  The children REALLY enjoy doing these literacy activities and most are independent.  It is so much more fun to learn while you are playing!  This first one is for fine motor control.  It requires rolling play-doh into snakes and laying them on the shape template.  (So they are practicing shapes too!)

 The ABC practice had two sets of ABC cards and the kids were divided into two teams to see which team could put them in the correct order first!

 Writing meant to write the letters into a gel bag.

Our book baskets were over Brown Bear, Brown Bear this six weeks.  The kids would roll a dice (in the cyclinder with a lid) and color the animal with that number.

We read The Roly Poly Spider and talked about he got bigger and bigger as he ate and ate.  When he got stuck in the rain spout he got small again but then he was hungry once more!  The kids color and cut the spiders and glued them in order from biggest to smallest.

 Mrs. Shelton bought an adorable spider unit by Julie Lee and this worksheet is from her work.  This is a paper where we were labeling the body parts.  These spiders are so cute that it is impossible to be creeped out by them.  Real spiders however...

 This is an experiment from Deanna Jump's science book number 1.  The sugar cube is the spider's prey or fly.  The pipette with water represents the spider injecting venom into the prey to liquify it.  The kids then sucked up the liquid like a spider sucks up its dinner!  They L.O.V.E.D this and wanted to do it again!

Have you ever heard of a Hall of Mirrors?  Well at Ortiz, we have a hall of murals.  The children's art work is displayed on his or her own panel and then sent home at the end of the unit.