Wednesday, April 23, 2014

120- We are almost finished with the clay animals. This was a smooth, enjoyable process for almost all of the children. I have two students who needed the first day to become comfortable with the clay, so I will provide them another opportunity to create their animals.  Once they finish, we will be done with this step.  We will fire and glaze them over the next few weeks.  In the meantime, the students will be working on their habitats and other provocations in the classroom.

The Burchfield Penney Docents visited the kindergarten classes today and we were able to get outside for a nature walk!  The weather wasn't exactly ideal, but the children really don't mind.

118- The students want to track the areas in our community where we find the most pollution. We were going to have the students draw maps and then compare the maps with 116's maps, which will track the living creatures we see on our walk. The problem is that every student's map in 116 ended up slightly different.  To enable them to use this as more of a science experiment, we had the students trace the map of the community from a printout. They labeled the sites and streets that are important to us.  We'll trace our path in a different color and labeled the areas we find the pollution/living things. This is giving them real world experience with maps, to demonstrate the purpose of maps and allowing them to use maps to conduct research on the community around them. 

102- I worked with a small group on finishing their nocturnal animals. We should hopefully finish these within the next week and a half. Next month is going to be the start of an exciting, end-of-the-year project. 

101- We began exploring our senses in the same way 103 has been doing.  I introduced the senses and we used these beautiful, symmetric pine cones that Mrs. Call, our Assistant Principal, brought in.