More Turtles!

Hello family and friends!
                        
This has been such a busy week packed with turtle exploration! We've been learning a lot about the different types of turtles, their physical characteristics, and their habitats. It's been a great week of learning for all of us. We've learned so many facts about turtles that I never knew, and the kids have really gotten excited about these new ideas. It looks like we will be wrapping up our exploration early next week, followed by some time spent exploring Chanukah!

To start our week, we spent some time exploring the different parts of a turtle and their usefulness to turtles. We were able to spend some more time examining our turtle artifacts and we were also able to visit a preschool classroom that has two pet turtles. We spent some time in there looking at the turtles interact in their environment and asking some more questions. We've also been talking about the different types of turtles. We have mainly been exploring sea turtles and tortoises. We have used large group and one-on-one time with the kids to read books about the typed that interest them the most. After exploring the different types of a turtles, we each made a turtle out of clay. We left books out in the art center for the kids to explore while they molded all the parts. As they made their model turtle, we encouraged them to think about which type of turtle they were making and their physical characteristics. We discovered that they are all shaped differently based on their type in order for them to survive in their different environments. After molding the clay we were able to paint it them.

We also spent time talking about the importance of scientist and rangers. We learned that they make a huge difference in the conservation of turtles. We did talk some about extinction. This mainly came about when a book we read mentioned that turtles were alive during the time of the dinosaurs (of course the class went crazy...they love dinosaurs!) That got us talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs and the fact that animals can still become extinct today. That's why it's so important for us to take care of our environment and learn about ways to help animals in the wild. We discussed the fact that out of a 100 eggs that a sea turtle lays, there is on average, only 2 eggs that usually survive. It was difficult to find 100 of the same objects in our room to show them what this would look like, but we were able to find 100 pattern blocks. We pretended that they were eggs and we laid them out in the middle of our carpet and counted all the way to 100. We discussed the different difficulties that a hatchling might face on the way to the ocean and we ended up with only 2 blocks (or eggs) left. I think this was a good way for them to have a visualization of how special it is when we see a sea turtle...it's a big deal if one of them makes it to the ocean! After our conversation, we've been hearing a lot of talk of scientists and rangers...which we love! :)

Another thing we did this week was exploring the size of different turtles. We learned that the world's largest turtle in the leather back sea turtle, which can grow up to 8 feet long. We also learned that the world's smallest turtle is the speckled cape tortoise, which only grows to be 3 inches long. To show this we got out our measuring tapes and laid the length out on the floor. We laid down next to it and found out a leather back was even taller than our teachers! They were also curious about whether a leather back turtle would be as tall as the ceiling. Of course we had to check that out too. I stood on the table and we measured from the ceiling to the floor to find that leather back are probably only about a foot shorter than our ceiling (I apologize in advance if anyone climbs on the table at home. We take full responsibility :)). After measuring, we went to the supply closet and measured out 8 feet of paper in length. We took it back to our room and laid it across the floor. We measured it out and then drew our own life size leather back turtle. The kids spent most of that morning coloring and talking...it was so much fun! We also measured a 3 inch piece of paper and drew a speckled cape tortoise to compare the sizes of the two. These are both hanging up in the hallway if you'd like to check them out. There are also some writing workshop samples hanging in the hallway. The kids told us some facts they had learned about turtles, then wrote them down and drew a picture to go along with it. I loved the list they made! It was such an encouragement to hear that they had soaked up so much knowledge in just a weeks worth of time.

To end our study, we have started working on some turtle habitats with boxes. We are decorating one box to look like a sea turtle habitat and the other to look like a tortoise habitat. We're talking about where they live, what they eat, and how they survive in these different habitats as we work. We plan on wrapping these up early next week. After we finish, we will be putting our model turtles in their appropriate habitat and put them on display in the hallway. I'm so impressed with how hard they've been working on these! I hope all of you enjoying looking at all their hard work this week. We've had so much fun!

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs, and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Compare lengths of two objects.
• Represent simply tow-dimensional geometric shapes.
• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Count orally forward to twenty and backward from three.

Examining real turtles...

 

 

Sculpting clay models of turtles and their parts...

 

 Writing/Illustrating our turtle facts...

 

 

100 turtle eggs!

 



Measuring and drawing the actual size of turtles in the wild...

 

Turtles

Hello family and friends!

We have had a great week back at school! I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving break spent with family and friends. The kids fell back into routine easily and we've started exploring a new area of study. Before I dive into that, I want to take this time to welcome Zeke to our classroom family! Zeke recently moved here from Chicago and had his first day in our classroom this past Monday. We are excited to welcome him into our class!

To start this week, the kids voted on their new area of study. I wasn't here on Monday but Michelle said it went well. They chose between the subjects of koala bears, turtles, or digestion. Apparently it was a close call between digestion and turtles but turtles won by one vote! As with each of our studies, I never know how to predict a time frame of how long it will take. It seems to consistently be about 2 - 3 weeks. I know it's getting close to Chanukah so we will be taking breaks from our turtle study to talk about the holiday. We're also planning some fun Chanukah activities with Morah Devorah and we are continuing to work on our dance for the play.

The first thing we do when starting a new study is work on our KWL chart. The kids knew a good bit about turtles (which we listed in the K column). They also had a good bit of questions about what they wanted to learn (listed in the W column). We always make sure to leave some extra space in the "W" column because we find that as we learn new things, it also causes us to ask new questions. We were able to find tons of books at the library which are scattered throughout our room now. We spent a good bit of time exploring these turtle books during reading workshop. As I watched the kids in reading workshop this week, I couldn't help but smile. The progress they've made in workshops from the beginning of the year to now is amazing! They did some pair picture walks and everyone was taking turns with the books. They were talking together about the pictures and new ideas they found through these pictures. They were really engaged with one another. Also, the kids actually presented their material to the class this week. They found pictures they wanted to share and talked about something new they learned about turtles from their picture walks. I hope you enjoy the presentation pictures below...I thought they were so sweet! This week, as we presented our findings, I wrote down the new ideas we learned from our books. There is a picture below. What a great list of facts we discovered just from talking about pictures with a peer!

One thing that came up from our reading workshop discussions was the fact that sea turtles bury their eggs. This peaked an interest with the kids. We learned that sea turtles use their back flippers to dig a hole 20 inches deep before laying their eggs and covering them up with sand. We pulled out a measuring tape to show the kids exactly how deep that was. I think we were all impressed that a turtle could dig that deep with just it's back flippers! This lead us to taking our measuring tapes outside to try to dig a hole that deep. The kids used shovels, small rakes, and their hands to dig the holes and then measured them. I think they had a new appreciation for that 20 inch turtle hole before the digging was over! No one could get their hole 20 inches after measuring but they assured me they would keep trying every day until they did it :)

Our hole digging also lead us to talking about sea turtle eggs. We learned that most sea turtle eggs measure to be about 4 cm long. We decided it'd be fun to make our own eggs and measure them. We used white clay (matching the color of real turtle eggs) to make our eggs. We rolled the clay into balls and measured them, then kept adding more clay until we got to 4 cm. We are letting our eggs get hard then we plan on burying them in the sand once we dig that giant 20 inch hole! We also learned that these turtles can lay up to 200 eggs and that they do not come out hard like a normal egg that we think about. They are soft and leathery so when they drop 20 inches they won't break. To show the importance of these eggs being soft and bouncy, we decided to do a little science experiment. We dropped both a hard egg and a soft clay egg from 20 inches to see which one would survive the fall. As all scientist do, we made a hypothesis about each egg before dropping it. After seeing the hard egg crack open, we all agreed that it was important for these eggs to be soft at first so they wouldn't crack before the baby turtle had completely formed inside the egg.

We were also able to borrow some turtle artifacts from other classrooms. We did some exploring of a large turtle shell. We could see the spine from the inside roof of the shell and explored the different holes where the legs and head are attached. We were also able to explore a preserved baby turtle. We were able to examine the top and bottom of it's shell, as well as it's legs, head, and tail. We read that most baby turtles measure to the size of a quarter. We took a quarter and compared it to our baby turtle and found that it was almost a perfect match. I think we've all learned some new facts about turtles this week. We're excited to see where our exploration takes us next week!

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment. 

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities, and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Explore books independently.
• Begin to ask "how and why" questions when looking at text.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs, and photographs in the classroom. 

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Compare lengths of two objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Organize and represent data with real objects. 

Working in pair during reading workshop...

Presenting our findings on turtles...

"We have to make it to 20 inches!!"...

Perfecting and measuring our turtle eggs...

Testing our hypothesis with an egg drop experiment...

Thanksgiving Fun!

Hello family and friends!

This has been such a fun week for us in the Aalva class as we prepare for Thanksgiving. We've talked a lot about what Thanksgiving means to us and our different traditions. We've also focused on the idea of family. This week, we've learned more about the differences and similarities in each of our families and what we value from time spent together with them. I always enjoy the times when we talk about our family differences. It's a great time for us to ask questions, learn something new, and focus on respecting traditions that are new to us.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, Rabbi Meir had mentioned that we should be careful when talking about Native Americans. He told us to remember not to stereotype them, which in turn would be disrespecting them. I knew that there were several directions we could take this subject. And to be honest with you, at one point I contemplated skipping it all together, as it can tend to be a touchy subject. However, Michelle and I knew it was an important subject to address. Because I have family members who are Native American, I first thought about bringing in some authentic artifacts from various family members and talk about their culture. However, after thinking about it, I wondered if maybe the kids only had a concept of Native American history. If so, I wanted to show them that Native Americans are very much alive and present in our society today. We decided to start by asking the kids what they knew about Native Americans. They told us a list of answers, including...

• they are strong
• they can fly
• they grow big gardens
• they use bow and arrows
• they are really called Indians
• they are bad guys
• they only walk (when I asked if they drove cars, they laughed and said no way)
• they are not alive today

After hearing these answers we knew that we needed to give them a different view of Native Americans. I prefaced our talk by reminding them that it's important to know Native American history (just like it's important to know our own history), but that I also wanted us to recognize that they are people just like we are. We focused on different tribes that are still present today in South Carolina. We brought in a map of our state and discussed the different tribes and where they live in comparison to where we live in Columbia. We also brought in pictures of Native American children in the present day. We saw that they go to school just like us, dress like us, read the same books that we do in our classroom, use markers like us, live in homes like us, and have families just like we do. It took a couple of days for these new ideas to sink in so we made sure to talk about it throughout the week. We left our present day pictures up in the room for them to visit and discuss. If you think about it over Thanksgiving,  bring up the subject and see what they say. I'd love to know their thoughts!

Our Native American discussion also lead us to our discussion of family. We discussed how all families are not the same. Some of us have siblings and some of us are the only child in the house. Some of us have both parents living at home and some of us have two homes that we get to visit. Some of us have grandparents that live with us and some of us travel to visit grandparents. We concluded that no matter how our families looks, they are valuable, loved, and important to us. With this discussion, we also made family portraits. This is something that I thought would only take one afternoon to complete. I had envisioned them quickly drawing their family members and then moving on to something new. I was SO wrong! The attention to detail in these portraits is amazing. Michelle and I sat down with each child individually as they worked and we talked in detail about each family member. We talked about what we loved about them, what we enjoyed doing with them, what they looked like, etc. Everyone drew their family members and then used art supplies to decorate them any way they chose. I think the quickest family portrait was done in 35 minutes. I'm so impressed by the attention they put into these. It ended up taking us a couple of days to complete them, which bumped out some other things we had planned, but we felt like it was worth it! We had some precious conversations. A couple of parents have asked if we helped the kids make these - nope! It's all their hard work. Check them out if you get some time. They'll be hanging up in the hallway near our classroom door through next week.

During all of our Thanksgiving talk the past two weeks, we realized that just about all of us have had pumpkin pie on our minds. We decided that instead of making a real one (even though that would be so yummy), we would try to make a pie using play dough. We were able to find a recipe that was edible and that could be flavored. We made it and dyed it orange then everyone ate a small sample. The kids loved it! I wasn't a fan at all. I'm not sure if it was the flavor or the consistency of play dough that completely grossed me out! Either way, the kids thought it was awesome and that's all that matters :) We put the play dough in a pie pan and divided it into pieces. We counted and talked about cutting it into halves and fourths. Then, we pulled out housekeeping materials and the room quickly turned into a pumpkin-pie-making factory! Everyone had abandoned their toys and the tables were full. They made pumpkin muffins too and served them to each other. It was a fun time of counting, cutting, and serving one another!

I also want to share that the kids will be performing a dance for the Chanukah play on December 17th. Morah Devorah introduced us to the music this week so we've been spending some time each day listening to it and getting used to it. We'll start learning the dance soon and the kids seem eager to get started. As a reminder, I won't be writing a post next week since it's a short school week. We will be closed Wednesday - Friday. I hope everyone enjoys this next week with family and friends. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Approaches to Learning:

• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 
• Show ability to focus attention for increasing variety of chosen tasks and activities for short periods of time (10-20 minutes).
• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.

Social & Emotional:

• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Show awareness and respond to feelings of others with adult guidance and support.
• Stand up for rights much of the time.
• Describe characteristics of self and others. 
• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud. 
• Begin to distinguish between real and make-believe in stories read aloud. 
• Relate information from texts to personal experience. 
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in their environment.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as". 

Creating our family portraits...

Serving pumpkin pie...

Cutting pie into halves and fourths for sharing...

Making and sorting pumpkin muffins and other yummy foods...

Thankfulness

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Aalva class! With Thanksgiving approaching, we've been spending some time talking about the holiday and what it means to us. We will be continuing this throughout the rest of the month. We started the week by asking the kids what they thought "thanksgiving" meant. The majority of our answers revolved around food and playing. It opened the door for some great conversations about time spent with family and friends. We have recorded these answers and hung them up in the hallway if you'd like to check them out. As we continue to talk about Thanksgiving during the next two weeks, we're interested to see how these answers change and expand.

One of the main things we wanted to focus on through our study was the idea of being thankful. We discussed that being thankful is something we feel all through the year...not just on Thanksgiving. We discussed the definition of being "thankful" and agreed that it meant "to be glad you have something in your life". We decided that we tend to be thankful for the things we love and the things that mean the most to us. After talking and reading about being thankful we made a classroom thankful tree. We had the students make leaves using their hand tracings. After tracing their own hand, they cut them out, and wrote a word to describe what they were thankful for. After making our leaves, we went outside into the woods to find some branches. We knew that we wanted the branches to fit inside a vase so we measured our vase and then took some rulers out to measure branches. We looked for ones that were at least two feet long so that they would stick up high enough to hold several leaves. This was a great time exploring the beginning phases of the school's outdoor classroom! There is a path through the woods that leads to an open field that has recently been cleared (we can't wait to see the final product of the new outdoor space!). We measured our sticks and brought them in to assemble our thankful tree. We told the kids that they could add to our tree whenever they wanted to. Anytime they thought of another reason to be thankful, they could make a new leave and hang it up. We have added some cookie cutters for tracing in our art center along with a hole puncher and yarn. The kids have really been excited about this activity and have made everything by themselves! Their tree is sitting outside our classroom door. If you have time, stop by and read some of their sweet notes!

During our thankful discussion we also decided it might be fun to make our own book. This is something that the kids have started doing on their own during their center time. Many of them pull out paper throughout the day and staple it and draw pictures. I think some of this was encouraged by the first grade class a few weeks ago. They came by our classroom with homemade books and read them to us...which the kids loved! Making books has been a hobby in our room ever since. We titled our books, "My Thankful Book". At the top of each page there is written, "I am thankful for...". In our room during read alouds, we talk a lot about what it means to be authors and illustrators. We brought this discussion up again before starting our books. We reminded the kids that they would be both the author and illustrator of this book as they would be the ones to write their thankful words and draw pictures to go along with them. This was a great time for them to focus on the beginning stages of writing. We were so impressed with how sweet and meaningful these books turned out! They will be on display in the hallway this month if you'd like to read them.

Throughout these discussions of being thankful, we have also touched on the idea of traditions. We talked about the fact that each family is different and has different ways that they celebrate Thanksgiving. We talked about differences in the foods we eat, the people we spend time with, the languages spoken in our homes, where our families come from, and any other ideas that the kids brought to the table. We found out that we all have some similarities and differences. We were able to share in our similarities and learn through our differences. It was a great discussion that will hopefully have the kids talking at home about your own family life and traditions. If anyone has any special traditions they'd like share with the class, we'd love to hear about them through pictures, artifacts, etc. Feel free to bring some stuff in or stop by to share your traditions with the class.

I also wanted to take some time in this update to tell everyone about our morning message. Our morning message is written on the dry erase board each morning and read aloud during our morning meeting. We keep the first two sentences the same which are..."Good morning! Today is (day of the week).". The third sentence is always different and discusses what we will do that day or anything important we'd like to tell the class. Throughout the year we've progressed from me reading the message, to the kids reading it with me, to dissecting it (which we've just recently started). We have the kids come up and find words or letters that they know and circle them. They have recently been asking for "tricky" words so we've been adding some challenges each week! This is a great way for us to discuss letters, sight words, punctuation, sentence forms, as well as reading. Even though some of these concepts aren't taught until later in kindergarten, we feel like it's never too early to expose the kids to new ideas! If it clicks with them, then that's great. If it doesn't, then hopefully it'll make those concepts even easier to understand once that time comes for them. I say all this to brag on your sweet ones! They have really embraced this new activity and are always quick to ask for it if I ever forget. I'm so impressed with their desire to learn and their eagerness to try new things!

Here are just a few standards that were covered this week...

Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, or problems. 
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one more more ways.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction. 
• Participate in group life of class.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play. 
• Express fears and concerns to familiar adults.

Language & Literacy:

• Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
• Use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
• Combine some letters with pretend writing.
• Makes some upper case letters without regard to proportion or placement.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language. 
• Creates a pictures and labels it orally.
• Describe events of personal significance.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Understand and use positional words to describe the locations of objects (up, down, in, over, under, behind, on top of and in front of).
• Identify and copy simple patterns.

Writing on thankful leaves...

Searching/measuring for the perfect tree branches...

                                               

Assembling our tree...

We are authors and illustrators...