Ocean Project, Family Gardening Event

A lot has been going on in the classroom the last couple of weeks.  Parent Conferences, spring fever, getting ready for our big family event Friday night, all while practicing our sign language song with our next-door-neighbors.  Whooo!  We are busy!



We have started a study on ocean animals and we are enjoying it so much that I think this one will last awhile.  Right now we are researching sharks and our friends are bringing things from home that have to do with all kinds of sharks.  Several friends have drawn various sharks (and other ocean animals) for our big board, painted by our class.  As you might know (or you might not), the ocean has several zones, the sunlit zone, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone.  There are a couple of more, but not many animals live there so we are concentrating on these three.  Each child is making some type of sea creature (their choice) and adding it to the zone it belongs in.  So far, so good.  Everyone is interested in this, and once we started adding animals, everybody wants in.

 

 

 

 This is our class quilt that we raffled off at our event.  Each child chose the fabric for their handprints and we love it....

 

 

 

 

Gardening Day = SUCCESS!!

Well, I have to say that I am so proud of my pumpkins today.  We had a gardening day where we stayed outside basically ALL DAY, and it was a wonderful success.  Another class and I set up the activity, and opened it to all the classes if they wanted to participate. And they did, so we had children from babies to age 5 out on the playground working and playing all morning.  Then the VPKers went out again after lunch for another activity with some volunteers from the Arboretum.  It was wonderful. 


We had stations all over the playground:   A planting station.  Children planted seeds, one to take home and at least one for the big garden we are going to plant next month.

A Reading Station:  We brought books out about gardening and read them in the gazebo.  Children could come and go as they wished.

 

 

An Art Station:  Paints were set up, children could choose their own colors and paint anything they wanted.  For inspiration, we had a still life of sunflowers handy...

 



A Writing Station:  Colored pencils and clipboards with paper were set out, as well as a lovely bouquet of daisies.  Children spent a lot of time at this station....

 

And of course, a WEEDING STATION:  Self explanatory.  Children helped us clean out our beds for new planting.

 

 

After lunch, we went back out and tried out some fruits in our own fruit trees.  Mulberries are just getting ripe so we tried those out.

 

 

The loquat trees are producing like crazy too, so we tried some of those, then planted the seeds we had left.  Maybe someday we will have an orchard on our playground!

 

 

As a little bonus, a pineapple that Ms. Amie planted almost FOUR YEARS AGO has a baby pineapple on it, so we visited that.  No one in our class has ever seen a baby pineapple on the plant before so this was pretty special....

 

 

I'm feeling like there are going to be more gardening days in our future.  And that makes me happy.









 

Sewing and Quilting...and other stuff....

We are having a special event next month at our school, called "Come Grow With Us".  This is a spring event, and we are going to be adding to our organic garden , hopefully with a lot of really great vegetables, fruits and herbs.  But my point is that each class is making a fundraising project.  Ours is going to be a quilt.  First we traced each child's hand.  I hate to brag, but I have an EXTENSIVE collection of kid-friendly fabrics, so I brought in a huge bin and each child chose which one they felt expressed the true "them", and we cut them out.  Then we all practiced sewing on Ms. Amie's (my) sewing machine. 

 

The kids loved it!  I think I might bring the sewing machine back later for another project I'm thinking about.  I will definitely post photos when we finish the quilt.

 

 

 

Next came Dr. Seuss' birthday (the week of March 2).  We did a lot of fun things to celebrate:

 

We painted Cat in the Hat style hats with patterns of our choice, and posed for a group photo with them.

 

We read a LOT of Dr. Seuss books and use various props to retell the stories. 

 

 

 

 

After reading "The Foot Book", we traced our feet onto paper, and measured them with various items from our classroom.

 

 

We played a silly game called, "I Have, Who Has?", where everybody has to pay very close attention.



 

 

On to St. Patrick's Day....



 



 

 



 

Letter detectives looked around the classroom for words that start with various letters.

 

 

 

Dr. Linda Walters brought some students over from the biology department as well as some ocean friends to visit.  Not only did the kids get to learn some really interesting facts about the sea creatures, they could handle them if they wanted to!  There are definitely some benefits to being located on a university.

 

 

 



 



 

My (Teacher's) Heart is Full....

As I look around my classroom today at all the activities going on and the conversations going on and the fun we are all having, I just keep wondering about how I can do more.   How can I make these experiences more meaningful and beneficial for these kids that parents have entrusted me with?  How can I make that spark happen for each one of them?  How can I make sure they are open and ready for the world when I no longer see them every day?  (All this, keeping in mind that I am only human....sigh.)

This is what was going on as I had these thoughts....

• Art Center--Three children and a visiting teacher worked on recycled art.  They all worked together on ideas about how to do things. 
• Dramatic Play Center--Four children ran the Beauty Shop we have set up there (not all girls, either!).  Some were shampooing, one was adding hair extensions, and another was relaxing in the spa-like atmosphere.
• Light Table--two children were playing with Magna-Tiles, which are so pretty on the light table.  After they built their construction, they got out colored pencils and clipboards and sketched what they had built.
• Computer Center--Two children worked together on a rocket spelling game on the IPad.  They were listening to sounds and associating them with letters.
• Writing--Children came and went to the writing center with me today.  Today they were writing each other's names in their journals.  Each child is an expert at their own name, and checked carefully to be sure others were doing a good job with it.
• Igloo (Quiet Center)--we set up our igloo as a quiet center for two or three children to go and read or write quietly, and most of the children visit there daily at some time or another.  Today, two children gathered up a bunch of quilting stories and asked a college student to read them ALL to them.
• Math Center--I set up an activity where we used tangrams to set up quilt blocks (we are working on a class quilt for a fundraising event, and we are doing a short study on quilts).  We took pictures of the plans and will use them later to make paper quilts replicating the patterns.
• Happy music permeated the room, and here and there, people (teachers AND children) burst out in singing and dancing. 

I hope I never stop wondering how I can do and provide more for these children.

Documentation (by children)...

My class is all about representing what they see these days.  While looking at a book with cutaway pictures of airplanes, a child made this picture (he added the "fire" coming out of the engines).  Pretty amazing....

 



 

Another child watched for a little bit, then decided to find another book about fire trucks and look what he did.

 

 

A third child watched all of this and made his own fire truck, then brought me the picture and asked me to "write the words".  This isn't anything new, but they don't usually ask me to do it without prompting.  This is a perfect example of how children will learn from each other if we can leave them alone for a minute.  You should have heard all the discussion about this part and that part of each of these vehicles!  

 

 

Also, none of these children are what I would call "Enthusiastic Writers".  But once they found something they were interested in, there was no stopping them.

 

 

Next time we were outside, we noticed some really cool plants, and one of my friends told me that the ferns were around when dinosaurs lived (photos below are from our playground, today....).

 



 

 

This was pretty cool, so we brought one in so he could share this information with the class, and then we put these out on the science table for observation.

 

Documenting what they see....

Labeling with the information he had, "These lived when dinosaurs lived."

 

 

Another invitation, this time in the writing center. 

 

In this case, children chose the natural material they wanted to look at closely, and illustrated them.  If they wanted to add labels, we helped with that.

 

 

Again, I can't stress enough how important observation among peers is here.  Not only is the observer learning (look how closely she is watching!), but the writer gets to experience being a leader and feeling like the "teacher".  We always say that we are all learners in our classroom, and this is what we mean.