Going Green

      As many of you know we LOVE food in our class! We love cooking food, making food, and trying new types of food.

      We have been keeping our cooking program alive through the generosity of our PTO and parent donations, so thank you, thank you, thank you for all you have done.
      

      

 However, we thought we could save some money and the Earth by going green with our cooking supplies.
     Once again our parents have come through for us and donated plastic plates, dish soap, sponges and a drying rack! The kids have begun doing the dishes after we cook, and we have found that this is a great way to encourage independence in our students, plus they think it is really fun!

Jan Brett & Scientists

Throughout the month of January our class studied Jan Brett. We read "The Mitten", "The Umbrella", and "The Hat".
With our Jan Brett unit I incorporated teaching the writing process through writing our own Jan Brett books. The students created their own plans and rough drafts. Once they wrote their rough draft they edited their stories and read them with their peers. After I went over the book with the students and then they worked on typing their own stories!

Once the stories were typed up we printed them off so students could illustrate, write their dedication and about the author! We are waiting for the stories to get laminated and we will have a class of official authors!

I also had to share these adorable pictures of the kids during our journaling from our germy potato experiments! We had a parent donate some surgical masks for the kids to wear while they are working on their science experiments. The kids LOVED them!

Inquiry

Our class has begun diving into inquiry during our science time. The concept behind inquiry in science is making science accessible to kids and helping them to understand the scientific process.

We have been writing in our science journals, because real scientists keep track of what they have done. This also helps us with non-fiction text features because students are responsible for keeping a table of contents with the name of the investigation as well as numbering their pages so that they can find the investigations we have done.

This week the kids began an investigation of germs. We started by discussing the things we already knew about germs and then did some germ research through books and a short video. From there the kids took potatoes and rubbed them on their hands and the sink (they thought this would be a germy place in our classroom that we all touch throughout the day).

We kept a control potato just so we know what potatoes normally look like when they sit out for a couple of weeks.  We will be watching our potatoes for germ growth and recording our results in our journals.

They also did an investigation into our hearts. They listened to their heartbeats with stethoscopes and discussed how our heart is a muscle and a way to keep that muscle healthy is by exercise. They then tried different types of exercise and recorded what it did to their hearts. 

New and Improved Blog!

Thanks so much to all of your input about my blog! After reading through my emails I am feeling motivated to get my blog back into shape!

I chose to switch to this blogspot address because the main concern that I got from the emails was that the pictures caused my blog to load slowly. Hopefully this new site will be able to load faster so that I can keep uploading pictures of the great things students are doing in here.

Again, thanks so much for your input and I will continue to let you know as I figure out new things on this blogspot!