The Mystery!

The Mysterious Animal Mystery!

Wow!  We became kindergarten scientists and helped Dr. Curious research about a new species he had discovered.  This was challenging and FUN at the same time.  We researched and took notes for the first time and then used our notes to orally present our thoughts!  We then drew a picture of what we each thought the animal would look like.  Dr. Curious actually came to visit our class.  He reviewed our notes and congratulated us on our scientific abilities!  Please follow all the details below!  It was an amazing project! Thank you Mrs. Ardizzoni and Mr. Musselman for all your help with this project.

We referenced the animal family charts and Dr. Curious' notes.

As you already know, our class studied animal families as one of our science units.  In order for students to apply their understanding of animal families in a new setting, we explored a mysterious animal that has many characteristics from different animal families.

Students were introduced to this challenge by a video plea from Dr. Curious (a.k.a. Mr. Musselman of the Burlington Science Center) asking the students to help him figure out what kind of animal it was.

He let us borrow his scientific journal so we could read all about his observations of this mysterious animal and take notes of all the important facts that we wanted to use as evidence. Keep scrolling through the document to find more of the notes!

Dr. Curious' Challenge:

Here is the link to the full journal we reviewed: The Journal of Dr. Curious

Then, we reviewed everything we knew about the characteristics of the animal families and used our notes to make a decision.

Our illustrations reflected the details that stood out to us in our notes.

We drew a picture of what we thought the animal looked like, videotaped our persuasive arguments and sent them to Dr. Curious.  Was this animal a bird, a mammal, or an amphibian?  The students wanted to know!

I think because....

What a surprise it was to see Dr. Curious show up in the classroom to review the students’ findings, just like real scientists do!

Dr. Curious was very enthused to hear our theories.

Dr. Curious tricked us!  His creature is a Squird! Happy Halloween!

A squird?! - Dr. Curious tricked us.  He presented a made up animal that was created through taxidermy. Science does not always have a clear-cut answer but you do need to use a scientific approach to solving problems. 

Thank you Dr Curious!  We had fun and hope you were impressed!

Demonstrating our Animal Family Knowledge

Our students are so proud of themselves and are eager to share their work!  What a pleasure it was for Mrs. Parnell and Mrs. Hoyt to watch the reactions of our students as they watched and listened to their presentations on our Touch it Board today.

Over the last 2 weeks we have worked on a few projects that have helped us to demonstrate all we have learned about animal family classification.  After sorting nearly 200 beanie baby animals we were each assigned to draw one on the iPad with the Drawing Pad app and then explained our drawing with the Explain Everything app.

Room 101 worked with Mrs. Ardizonni to create this video.  Watch and listen as we tell you about some of the animals and animal families we learned about.  Each child will share which animal family the animal they selected to draw is in!

Dracula visited Pine Glen!

Ms. P. of the Burlington Public Schools science center paid a visit to the Pine Glen kindergartners today.   She brought a great horned owl named Dracula.  We learned all about owls.  They are in the bird family, are nocturnal and do not really like people to touch them.  Dracula is special because she is a guest at the science center.  She was injured and unable to return to her natural habitat in the woods on Cape Cod.  She lives at a zoo on the Cape now but is staying at the science center while the zoo completes renovations.  Lucky us!

We learned about the owl's eyes, feathers and neck.  Did you know that an owl has twice as many neck bones as a human?!  That is how an owl can turn its neck nearly 360*.   Ms. P played a CD with the many different sounds that different species of owls make.  We were very good at replicating some of the sounds!

Meet our new guidance counselor, Ms Zanotti!

During recess today friends in room 101 stopped to meet our new guidance counselor. 

Bus safety!

Officer Schipelittiof the Burlington Police Department visited us today to speak about bus safety!  Special thanks to our parent helpers who helped "rescue" us when we practiced exiting the bus!

Math mastery

We reinforced our knowledge of values up through 10 and our ability to represent various amount on 10 frames.

Sight Words Set Two

Our second set of sight words will be sent home shortly.  Check the frequency words list page at the top of this page for a study set of flashcards.

Rain, rain, it's okay!

Rain, rain it's okay.......we'll just stay inside and play!

Skeleton creation!

Babies?!

We are expecting!   We wondered what the cockroach laid this morning......it  was an egg sack!  By morning we should have nearly 100 baby cockroaches! Yikes!

The gorillas were awesome'

Fish!

Wow that lion is big!

Add caption

More making words!

Practicing our flash card words!

Building our sight words with letter tiles!

To help us practice for our word quiz we did some word work earlier this week.

Working hard on our animals.

Animal project on the iPads

After introducing the Drawing Pad app earlier this week Mrs. Ardizzoni stayed to help students draw animals!  We really enjoyed this experience.

Reminder

Tomorrow - Friday October 17 - we are going to the zoo!

Please pack your child with a disposable, labeled lunch including a drink AND a separate disposable labeled bag with an additional snack (no drink).

Sneakers are strongly recommended.

Mrs A. visited us to introduce the Drawing PAd app

So many mammals!

It took a lot of discussion and debate to categorize all of the beanies into the various animal families, but we all agree that Mrs. Parnell has a lot of Beanies that are mammals!  Some of us had never counted so many objects before.  As you can see the mammals were sorted into piles of 10 and counted.

There are 150 mammals in her collection of 200 beanies.  

Word quiz Thursday!

Reminder! -  Our word quiz will be on Thursday.  Students will be assessed two ways.  We will show them flashcards and ask them to read the words.  We will dictate words and ask them to write them.  Please help your child practice at home.  We played a flashcard game this afternoon and some of us still need to practice.

The Ghosts Go Flying 1 By 1

In the spirit of the season we have been singing a counting song about ghosts!

Animal Sort

Learning about animal families, characteristics and habitats - Super Science 

Counting and comparing the beanie baby animals - Cool Math

Sketching, labeling and writing about the various animals - Exciting ELA!

Kindergarten - Just Plain Fun!!!

Students demonstrated their knowledge of animal families by participating in the animal sort Touch it board activity that Mrs. Parnell and Mrs. Hoyt created.  Not only do they have to drag and sort the animals but then they need to explain their thinking as to why they placed in the given category.

Students worked to sort the beanie babies into the correct family.  If asked they will explain how they decided which category to put them in.  They know the characteristics of each animal family.  Very impressive!

We have hundreds of beanie baby animals to sort!

Next week we will continue on with this lesson when we count and compare the quantities of beanies we sorted into each family.  

Word Quiz Alert!

Students will be given their first word quiz assessment on Thursday, October 16.  Please help your child prepare by reviewing the flashcards that were sent home at Open House.  The words are also listed on the Kindergarten High Frequency Words blog page. (link above).

It would be beneficial for parents to help their child with writing as well as reading these words.

Labeling our pets

Our writing program encourages us to explore all the many forms of writing we do in our world.  People write lists, letters and emails.  We have diagrams, post-it notes and labels.  In fact, none of us could get through a day without the benefit of labels.  We have been practicing our writing by making labels around the classroom.  Today we worked on sketching and labeling pictures of our classroom pets.

Down to business in our "offices".

Parent volunteers

Thank you parents!  This week parent volunteers started helping out in our classroom.  They helped us make book pages for our Five Little Pumpkins book.  We always love the extra helping hands and are excited about all we can do when parents are in to help us out!  Thank you!

Mr. Bones

Meet Mr. Bones!

Mr. Bones arrived today!  It is very exciting and an excellent connection to the season and our study of the human body.  During our workboard time today students were asked to draw a skeleton with all the bones in their body.  There are a lot of bones!  We are also enjoying some festive songs for the month of October including one about bones!

Blocks

Amazing what a little collaboration can result in!

Room 101

Students in room 101 stopped to pose for Mrs. Parnell and Mrs. Hoyt.  What a beautiful class.

Snake

Cornsnakes do not eat corn!  What do they eat and how did they come to be called cornsnakes?

Tarantula

Meet Hairy-ette, she is an arthropod!

She may look scary, but Hairy-ette does not want to harm us.  Spiders are actually great to have around as they like to eat other insects!  

She uses her spinnerets to make her web.  Cool!