Thanks for a Wonderful Year!!

Hello family and friends!

It's hard for me to believe that I'm writing my last blog of the school year. It has flown by! Michelle and I have had so much fun working with you and your kids this year. We've seen so much growth in each one of them and we're so proud of the eager learners they have become. Thank you for all of your encouragement and support...we couldn't have done this year without our awesome parents! It's always hard to say good-bye, but you know where to find us. We'll both be in the 4's again next year and we'd love some visits from each of you! We thought you might like to see some pictures from the first and last week of school this year...enjoy! Thank you again for a wonderful year!!

Ashton

Asa

 

 

 

David

Finn

 

 

 

Vedh

 

Sadie

 

 

Kifer

Max

 

 

John Walter

John Adam

 

 

Kingston

And some of our wonderful friends that we added throughout the school year...

Owen

Zeke

Jacob

 

Our Egg Exploration Continued...

Hello family and friends!

I can't believe we're wrapping up our last full week of the school year. I feel like the year has flown by! We're officially on the final countdown for our eggs this week. We've been keeping up with our calendar countdown and their hatch date is Tuesday. I'm hoping that they wait until that day instead of coming early so we can see them hatching! I'll send out an email with a picture when (if) they finally arrive (although I'm sure you'll hear all about it at home)! We spent this week continuing to explore our eggs and chickens. We'll continue to do the same next week as we anticipate their arrival.

To start our week, we focused on the life cycle of a chicken. We read several books that took us through the stages from egg to adult chicken. We discussed that chickens start as an egg. Once they hatch they're called chicks and stay with their mothers for several months. They are then called a pullet for their first full year. After that they are either a hen or rooster depending on their gender. The kids spent some time in books exploring this life cycle and then illustrated their own.  They took their time drawing the details of each stage, including arrows that direct you through the process. We have these hanging up in the hallway above our lunch box wagon. Make sure you check them out!

Since we have been spending so much time over the past 3 weeks in non-fiction books, we decided to focus the majority of our week on fiction. We've been reading a lot of funny books about chickens and all the adventures they go on. As we've been reading, we've been talking about the importance of fiction books and using our imaginations. We've also been discussing the difference between fiction and non-fiction. We've talked about the different parts of a story and what it means to be both an author and an illustrator. Since we wrote a non-fiction book earlier this year about sea creatures, we thought it'd be fun to write our own fictional book. I really wanted this project to show the voice of each individual child. Because of that, I did not write up parts of the books with blanks for them to fill in like we did with our non-fiction book. This time we sat down with the kids one-on-one and either typed or handwrote their story. We did no editing on grammar or sentence structure. We just let the kids talk while we recorded it word for word. My only regret for this year is that we did not make more of theses books. They are fantastic! It was such an enjoyable experience for all of us as we wrote together. After typing up each story, the kids signed and illustrated their work. We also made a little paper plate chicken to go along with their story. They did all the cutting and drawing themselves! I love that each child went through different methods in creating the parts of their chicken. No two look alike! This whole process took us about 3 days to complete. After we finished them, the kids were able to present their story to their classmates. We read each story aloud. They were so very proud of themselves! We have laminated the stores and they're hanging up in the hallway along with their chickens. You have to read some...they're amazing!

Since we've learned so much about chickens and eggs over the past 3 weeks, we decided to see what others in our school knew about the subject. To do this, we conducted some surveys. Each students picked a question to ask. We discussed our questions, attached it to our clipboards, and walked around the school asking both students and teachers. After spending some time asking questions, we met back together and discussed our findings. We realized that we have learned a lot! This also gave us the opportunity to be a teacher to others about facts that we have learned. Here are some of the great survey questions that we came up with...

Ashton: Do roosters grow their comb before hens do?
Vedh: Do you know what a pullet is?
Kingston: Do you like chickens?
John Walter: Do you know what an egg tooth is?
Jacob: Do you know what a chicken wattle is?
David: Do you know what a chicken egg is?
Kifer: Do chickens eat worms?
John Adam: Are some chicks black?
Owen: Are some chicks yellow?
Zeke: Can chicks be black?

We have had so much fun with our egg exploration! I know it's going to be even more exciting next week when we have live chicks with us!


Approaches to Learning

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• 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 or more ways.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
• Participate in group life of class.
• Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
• Develop friendship with one or two preferred children.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy

• Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems.
• Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
• Use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
• Describe events of personal significance.
• Understand the relationship between print and pictures on page.
• Progress in understanding how books are viewed.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts real aloud.

Mathematics

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Identify two dimensional shapes: circle, square, triangle and rectangle.
• Recognize a simple pattern and extend.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.

We are experts! Exploring the life cycle of a chicken...

 

 

We are authors and illustrators! Writing, illustrating, and making chickens...

 

 

Conducting our surveys...

 

 

Our Egg Exploration!

Hello family and friends!

We have had such a fun week exploring our eggs and learning more about chickens! We just passed our one week mark on our egg incubation. That means we have about 2 weeks left until they hatch! We've been checking our incubator daily to make sure the temperature is correct and to make sure our water supply stays full (the incubator has to stay humid). The kids are getting more and more excited about our chicks as we learn more about them. We are getting asked daily if today will be the day that they hatch! We're making sure we keep up with our countdown calendar too...as of today we have 11 more days of waiting.

As we've been exploring our fertile eggs, we've also been talking about the fact that eggs come in a wide range of sizes and colors. We found some eggs of different sizes and compared them together in a large group setting. We looked at an ostrich, emu, wren, hawk, and chicken egg. We looked at pictures of each bird and noticed that the larger the bird was, the larger the egg was too. After exploring them together as a group, we kept the eggs out in the science center. The kids were able to hold them and measure them to record the differences in size. We were able to get 2 emu eggs. One was whole and the other was cracked in half. With the cracked egg, we were able to see how thick the egg was and we noticed that it had layers. We realized how difficult it must be for a baby bird to hatch out of such a strong, thick egg. We discussed that if our eggs do hatch, the chick will probably be very tired from the hatching experience. All of the eggs we explored were real except for the hawk egg which was an exact replica. We did great with the eggs except for one incidence where our tiny wren egg got dropped on the table and cracked. Let's just say it was a great lesson on the stench of an old rotten egg! :)

We also did a couple of experiments with eggs this week. The first was putting an egg in vinegar. If you haven't heard of this before, the acid from the vinegar is supposed to dissolve the egg shell and, after a week, leave a rubbery bouncy egg. We put the egg in the vinegar on Monday and we each made a hypothesis about what might happen to our egg after a week. We got some great guesses! Some guessed that the egg would disappear or rot. Others guessed that it would crack or change colors. We even had some guess that it would make the yolk inside the egg go away. On the second day we checked the egg and noticed that the outer part of the shell was floating around on top of the vinegar and the pieces floating around were no longer hard and starting to disappear. We poured out the old vinegar and replaced it with a new supply. Throughout the week we poked the egg with our fingers and noticed that it was getting really soft and appeared to get larger in size. On Friday we pulled it out and tested our hypothesis. We were giddy to discover that our egg was soft and rubbery! We remembered from earlier this year during our turtle study that a hard egg breaks when it drops. We decided to test our soft egg by dropping it onto the table. We were expecting it to bounce but found ourselves shocked when it exploded all over the table! We did notice that the albumen and yolk had become slightly solid but the shell was holding a large amount of vinegar. It was neat for us to connect with our experiment from earlier this year and compare results.

Another experiment we've been doing is checking our incubating eggs with a flashlight. As the chicks develop inside the egg, we should be able to see a difference in the inside of the egg by holding it against a flashlight. We got into groups and tested each one of our eggs. We saw several different results from our testing. Some of the eggs obviously had no chick growing inside. We noticed that they were still orange and see through just like they were when we checked them on day one. On the other hand, we had a few eggs that showed us visible blood veins and a small dark spot forming! We were so excited that we squealed! (include me and Michelle). Some of the eggs were too difficult to tell either way. We discussed that even though we did see veins in some of them, that doesn't mean that all of those will continue to develop. After checking we feel hopeful that we'll at least have a couple that continue to form and hatch!

We also spent some time talking about the different parts of an egg and a chicken. We cracked an egg open and learned that the yellow part is called the yolk and the clear part is called the albumen. We also learned that the chicks eat these things while inside the egg to gain nutrients and help them grow. Someone asked what was inside the yolk so we experimented a little by stirring the two parts together. We noticed that there was nothing inside the yolk and that when we mixed the two together, the albumen was still easy to recognize as it didn't mix as well as the yolk. We also made a little game to help us learn about the different parts of a chicken. The game shows a picture of a chicken with different words. We've been exploring these new words a lot lately. We have been using the picture to match the words to the different parts of the chicken body. Our vocabulary has really grown over the past 2 weeks since we started our study! Here's a little list of vocabulary words as defined by some of the kids...

pullet - "a chicken that is under one years old" (John Walter)
egg tooth - "a little part that the chicken uses to hatch on it's beak" (David)
wattle - "a piece of skin that hangs from it's neck and it's red" (Zeke)
hatch - "that means a chicken tries to get out of the egg" (Max)
coop - "a house for chickens. It protects the chickens from coyotes, bears, and raccoon" (Aston)
rooster - "a boy chicken. When it's morning time he goes cock-a-doodle-doo" (Sadie)
hen - "a female chicken. She lays eggs" (John Adam)
chick - "a baby chicken. They crack open eggs" (Kifer)
incubation - "keeps the eggs warm so that the baby chicks come out" (John Walter)
albumen - "the clear part of the egg that a baby chicken eats when it's inside" (Jacob)
yolk - "the yellow part of the egg" (Jacob)
nest - "a mama hen lays her baby chicken eggs inside them. They grow inside and then hatch" (Owen)

We also made our own eggs and nest this week. After exploring our different types of eggs we also explored a real nest. We talked about the shape and purpose of the nest. Afterwards, we used clay to make our eggs. After they dried we painted the eggs. As we made these we talked about the difference in egg shapes and colors. We discussed that even chickens lay different colored eggs and that no 2 eggs look exactly the same. We also learned that every nest will look different. We gave the kids a pile of newspaper and paper bag stripes and asked them to use their imagination to create a nest for their egg. It took some trial and error but we discovered that the crumpled paper and some glue could make a perfect resting place for their egg. These will be on display in the hallway. The kids worked so hard on these! We hope you enjoy their little masterpieces!

Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Stand up for rights 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.
• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs and photographs in the classroom.
• Begin to use both pictures and text read aloud as cues to meaning of unfamiliar words.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Show one-on-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

Exploring different types of eggs...

 

 

 

Our vinegar and egg experiment...

 

 

 

Working hard at creating our eggs and nests...

 

 

 

Learning the different parts of a chicken...

 

 

 

We also saw a puppet show this week!...