Lovely leaves!

 We spent a couple of weeks last month learning all about leaves. Whenever possible, I like to introduce a new unit by letting the students examine tangible items up close and personal. They had a blast choosing leaves from the playground and looking at them up close under the magnifying glass.

We learned that humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, while trees and plants do just the opposite. God thought of everything when He created the world! To show the students a leaf actually producing oxygen, we plucked a leaf fresh off a tree and then submerged it in water. A few hours later, we were able to see air bubbles forming on the leaves!

The coolest experiment by far (to me, anyway) is extracting chlorophyll from a leaf! Who knew you could do this with kindergarteners?!? Using fresh leaves, we tore them into small pieces and placed them into a cup. We then covered the pieces with rubbing alcohol and placed a filter strip into the liquid in the bottom of each cup. 

We placed our cups into a windowsill and waited ...

The next day, our filter strips showed discoloration ... that's the chlorophyll!

We love science!!

K5 builds an ark

 One of my favorite kindergarten activities is our Noah's ark mural! We start with a blank sheet of very large paper and the kids do everything! First, we learn what a mural is. Next, we begin by painting our ocean. This part is extra fun because 1) I just squirt shades of blue all over the paper and they spread it all around, and 2) painting, duh! ☺

We also sprinkle some glitter around the mural to make our water nice and sparkly. In preparation for the construction of the actual boat, I draw various shapes onto brown poster paper, and the students help me cut them out. Then we take a look at our shapes and decide the best way to put them together to create a boat/ark structure. Here, the students are sketching out their ideas ...

I forgot to take pictures, but we decided on the best plan and then glued the brown paper onto our mural, making a boat shape. Finally, I let the students choose two animals; we colored pairs of the animals and the added them to our ark.

Finally, we added a rainbow out of paper scraps and cotton balls. And here is our finished product! Ask your child which animals they colored. What a fun way to bring the Bible to life!

Testing ... Testing ... is this thing on??

 I am SO SORRY it's been so long since I've blogged about K5! I have such a love-hate relationship with the month of October ... it's beautiful but so, so busy! To catch up, I thought you might like to see some of the learning games we do during the day. Students can choose these during math or reading time when Mrs. Viall is working with another small group.

Not only did this guy put the letters in the correct order, he did it with style! 

Word puzzles.

Matching a picture to its beginning sound.

Practicing writing upper and lowercase letters.

Putting the letters of the alphabet together to complete a puzzle.

Matching upper and lowercase letters.

I love this picture -- it's the face of victory! She was so excited when she found the right answer!

Still to come ... pictures of fun leaf experiments and our Noah's Ark mural process!

K5 gardeners

 Kindergarten was recently gifted with some leftover carrot and brussel sprout seeds, so we got our hands dirty this week! First we cleared out two big planters in our school garden area ...

Some of these old things were STUBBORN!

We stirred up our soil using spades and hand-held rakes, and the next day we planted our seeds.

We also saved some apple seeds from our recent apple unit in science, so one planter is a "test facility," ha ha ha. We'll see if we manage to grow an apple tree! How cool would that be if we're successful ... to have our very own tree from which to pick apples!