This week was surely a busy and exciting one! We had many things going on in our classroom and school throughout the week and we learned so much! We finished up our pumpkin study. Below you can see Jordan breaking open a pumpkin seed. The students were curious as to what was inside and he was very excited to share what he found (another seed!).
They also enjoyed watching mold grow in our pumpkin before we had to throw it away. They thought it was so cool!
The students wondered what color the inside of our white pumpkin would be. Before we cut it open, we voted as to what color we thought it would be. Most of the students thought that it would be white.
When we cut it open we noticed that it was yellowish/white.
The students enjoyed taking out the seeds and pulp, sorting and counting them.
In order to teach others what we learned about the pumpkin life cycle, they wanted to make posters to show each step. First we read stories and looked at the pictures of the life cycle of a pumpkin.
After splitting into groups, the students worked together to draw the illustrations of the different stages of the life cycle.
The students dictated to me what they learned about their stage and I wrote it on the top of their poster. Below you can see the posters for the seed & sprout stages.
Vines & Flower
Green pumpkin & Orange pumpkin
I displayed them in the hallway for others to see, they turned out great!
We also finished our KWL chart to show what we knew about pumpkins before the study, what we wanted to learn about them as we were beginning our study, and what we learned about pumpkins after the study was completed.
We also went on a field trip with Mrs. Myers class to the Montgomery County Solid Waste Department or as the students would tell you, the dump! We got to ride on a bus and the students really enjoyed it!
We ate lunch at the facility.
Then we learned how to separate our trash and recycling in order to help our environment more. We watched videos to learn why it is so important for us to recycle.
After lunch we walked over to the Environmental Learning Center to take a tour.
We watched a few videos about what happens to our trash and how it damages our Earth.
Here is our group before we took our tour!
Thank you to our parent volunteers including my mother as well!
Ms. Lorelei was our tour guide and she explained to us that throughout our tour, we were supposed to look for stickers with Kirby the Cardinal. These stickers represented recycled materials.
We learned so many interesting facts about trash and saw a "trash tornado" of some of the things we throw away.
Then we saw the tipping floor. This is where our trash trucks bring our trash and dump it on the floor. We could definitely smell the trash! Then front loaders pushed the trash into semi trucks and they take it to the landfill where they dump it and it stays.
My mom & I in front of the tipping floor.
So much trash!! We even saw someone's pumpkin from Halloween! Can you spot it in the picture below on the right?
The front loader was waving hello to us!
Pushing the trash into semis to take to the landfill.
We learned that they used to burn their trash before they realized that it was even worse for our environment.
We even got to play a few games where we sorted trash and recycling materials into the appropriate containers like the pictures below.
This game the students learned how much water different activities use and talked about how to conserve water.
This game the students worked together to move the marble through the landfill.
Ms. Lorelei taught us about different things that we could do to help our environment such as shutting off lights when we leave a room, turning off the water as we brush our teeth, turning off our video game consoles when we aren't using them, etc. Each student took a bookmark of something that they wanted to pledge to do more of in order to help our environment.
Below is one of the semis loaded with trash heading out to the landfill. Denise is using binoculars to search for the landfill on the other side of the highway.
You can make a difference!
Below are other things that were going on in our classroom this week!
Last week we finished learning about all of our uppercase letters! All of our alphabet cards are up on our word wall and they look great!
I forgot to get pictures of our cards that we added lowercase letters to this week. We learned about the following lowercase letters this week: c, o, s, v. We also finished up our white mosaic and earned our white book by learning how to spell the word white.
For Denise's birthday she brought in frozen yogurt which was perfect since it got warm again!
I added some pumpkin workstations and the students enjoyed working with them. With the one below, they match the uppercase letter with the lowercase letter in order to put the pumpkins back together.
Practicing making letters, drawing the appropriate number of dots in the tens frame, and recognizing the number word with these pumpkin number mats.
Using these apple and pumpkin cards, the students had to figure out how many dots are on each one. Then they practiced writing that number.
The students went through their writing folders and chose their best quality work to put in their portfolios. They can't wait to share their stories with you at conferences!
They also chose their best work from their exploration journals to put in their portfolios as well.
We practiced sharing our portfolios with our preschool reading buddies.
We had a special visitor on Friday. Ronald McDonald came to school to talk about the importance of reading. He showed what a difference it made when you read with expression and did an interactive activity with the crowd in order to help him read with more expression. He also called up 2 volunteers to help him spell the word library, where you can get books from!
He had a puppet and was reading a book about puppet names in order to choose the best name.
He also sang to the students about how important reading is and how much you can learn from it!
We have also began reading Charlotte's web as a class. After each chapter we talk about what happened and what we think is going to happen next. The students are really enjoying the story so far!
Thanks for stopping by! See you all Monday or Tuesday for conferences. Don't forget to bring your child with you so they can share their portfolios with you! Have a great week!
Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant
No comments:
Post a Comment