Apples Galore!

We have been learning A LOT about apples!

We have found the answers to lots of our questions in the books we have in our library.  We have learned how apple trees grow, the life cycle of apples, and what happens if you swallow a seed!  We have been most interested in the apple recipes!

Last week we decided to make applesauce!

We looked at different recipes that we found in the books we have.  We also watched some videos about how to make applesauce.  We brainstormed a list of what we needed. 

FINALLY, we were ready to actually MAKE the applesauce!

Everyone helped!  We all got pieces of apple to cut up into tiny little pieces.

Then we put our pieces into a crockpot with some water, cinnamon, and sugar.  We let it cook all day long!  It made the room smell DELICIOUS! 

The best part was tasting it!  Almost everyone wanted to try it.... and said it was GOOD!

We decided that we are very good cooks! 

Thanks to everyone who sent in apples!  This week we plan to taste test different kinds of apples and make some apple prints!  We're also trying to figure out if we can use the ovens in the kitchen to make some other apple goodies!

Exploration

This past week was filled with lots of exploration!

We found some new friends on the playground!

We were fascinated with these little creatures!  We wanted to bring them inside but decided they were better off living in their natural habitat!

We also started our first unit of exploration.  We voted on different things that we were interested in and wanted to know more about.  Most people said they wanted to learn about APPLES! 

We came up with a list of wonders... Things that we wanted to know about apples.

We came up with a great list of things we wanted to learn!



This will help us plan our apple unit.  We will use books, websites, videos and more to answer our questions. 

We can't wait to get started... we think this is going to be a tasty time!

Brown Bear Centers and a Special Visitor

This week we started centers! 

We usually will have literacy stations and math stations.  However, for our first attempt at centers we just did one round that was a combination of both literacy and math! 

We have been working on learning to read and spell the color words!  One of the books we read was "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.  All of our centers this week focused around Brown Bear! 

 

At this center, we traced the color words using the correct color crayon.  We also practiced reading sentences using the color words and the animals from the Brown Bear book!

At this center, we rolled a dice with the numbers 1-4 on it.  We then wrote the number in one of the bears on our paper.  This was good practice writing the numbers and recognizing the numbers!

At this center, we chose pictures of the animals from the Brown Bear story.  We counted the number of dots on each and animal and recorded it in the box on our papers.  We then colored the animal the correct color.  This was great practice counting, counting one to one, and writing numbers!

At this center, we used unifix cubes to make patterns!  We were very creative!  We saw lots of AB patterns (red, black, red black).  Some of us got fancy with other kinds of patterns!  We also did some measuring to see who had made a longer pattern and counting to see how many cubes we had used!

At this center, we rolled a dice with different shapes on it.  We then traced the corresponding shape on our paper and colored it in.  This was great practice making the shapes and identifying the shapes of square, rectangle, triangle, and circle. 

At the end of the week we had a visit from our Superintendent, Dr. Clifford!  He talked to us about the 40 developmental assets.  He also talked to us about being pirates and we sang our pirate chant together! 

Shapes, Lit Lab, and Picture Day... Oh My!

We had quite the busy week!

Last week we talked in depth about the shapes square, triangle, circle, rectangle and hexagon!  We talked about how many sides each shapes has.  Each day we made a different shape person.  This not only helped us learn about the shape but it also was great practice for our fine motor skills! 

Here are some pictures with our square people!

 

We have a new song that helps us remember the hexagon!  It is super fun... and catchy!  You can check it out here!

Also this week we visited Literacy Lab for the first time!  In literacy lab, we work in small group with a teacher.  This week all of our centers focused on our names.  We worked on writing our names, recognizing the letters in our names, and making those letter sounds. 

In one of our centers, we used cereal to trace our names!  This was more great practice for our fine motor skills!  When we were done with this, we practiced writing our names on dry erase boards.  We really worked on using a capital letter followed by lower case letters.

Another one of our centers focused on finding the letters of our names in magazines!  This was great practice recognizing the letters even when they might look different than what we are used to!

We also found the letters in our names using beads!  This really worked out our fine motor muscles because those beads were small! 

We also spelled our names using letter stamps!  We really talked about using upper and lower case letters and letter names and sounds!

After all that hard work this week, we needed to relax a little and posing for pictures was a fun was to do it!  We are all quite the little shutter bugs!

 Aren't we just the cutest kindergarteners you've ever seen?!?