Friday, January 27, 2012

Super Fish!

Mr. Musselman of the Burlington Science center visited the kindergarten classes at Pine Glen today! 
He built us a fish model and the kindergartners impressed him with our knowledge as we identified all the parts of the fish.  We learned the names and purposes of some of the fins and then learned about sharks and saw some shark teeth.

In addition to teaching us about the characteristics of a fish and showing us his Super Fish, he talked about other creatures we will see at the New England Aquarium and their animal families.    He shared lots of fun facts and taught us many new big vocabulary words.  Be sure to ask us about vertebrates vs invertebrates and what an exoskeleton is.  We talked about penguins.  Can you believe we will see birds at the Aquarium?!

The mollusks family was very interesting.  We saw and touched the shells of mussels, scallops and oysters.  The oyster even had a pearl in the making in it!

We also saw snails, whelks and conchs.  Mr. Musselman explained that the noise we hear when we hold the large shells to our ears is an echo bouncing off the chambers of the shell.  At lunch today we took advantage of the extra noise, cupped our hands over our ears and tried out his theory.  It worked.

The horseshoe crab and lobster were interesting.  Did you know that the concept of a plunger was created after scientists studies the suction cups on the bottoms of sea stars?

And thinking about suction cups...............the octopus has lots of suction cups!  Octopus are very strong and very smart.  Mr. Musselman brought an octopus and let us touch it.  This afternoon we were able to see some videos Mr. Musselman sent us.  We watched an octopus open a jar and remove the contents for lunch (a crab).  We also learned how an octopus at the New England Aquarium was so smart that it climbed out of it's tank one night and into another one to get a snack to eat!  The scientists have put a nice cover on that tank!  We are looking forward to our trip next week!












Thursday, January 26, 2012

Loving Reading!

We love to have books read to us.  This week we have read about Chinese New Year,  quilts and fish.  Mrs. Parnell shared some of her favorite fictional fish and quilt stories earlier in the week and on Friday Mrs. Hoyt plans to share her favorite story about quilts, The Quilt Maker's Gift.

Despite the many and varied things we do everyday, the children truly enjoy hearing special stories.  We are looking forward to starting a chapter book in February!  We are certain they will look forward to the next chapter every day.




Friday, January 20, 2012

Afghan, Quilt or Blanket?






We try to answer the question as to whether students special treasure is an afghan, quilt or blanket as we play the game 20 questions to learn about it.  Then we have few minutes of sharing before we dive into the measuring our our quilts.

We have practices measuring length, width and area using non-standard tools for measurement.  Our favorite job is measuring the area because we measure how many kindergartners fit in the area of our blanket!

Then we create new, paper quilts for each other.  In addition to looking colorful and showing that we can follow the pattern and directions, we are learning new things about each other. 

As you will see, the quilt projects are the highlight of our news this week too!

This has been a fun project for the week.  Next week will hope to finish looking at the rest of the treasures.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Touch it!

Touch it learning is fun! Our Fundations lessons are lots of fun!
We have been working on word play and forming sentences with the resources we have available on the Touch it board.  The boys and girls love taking turns at the board.  It is fun to move the words around to create sentences. 



Happy New Year!





Friends in Room 101 returned from break ready to work!  We dove right back in and began our study of fish and sea life!  During the last two weeks we have discussed and discovered quite a bit about hermit crabs, sea anenomes, whales, sand dollars and more!  We have sorted and counted play fish and creatures and have been working hard at creating a new book with art much like Eric Carl. In ELA we have begun working on our capital letters and are creating a dictionary.    This week we have spent a lot of time measuring with popsicle sticks, cubes and other tools.