Science Investigation 1: Getting to Know Wood

Kindergartners have been learning what it means to be a scientist.  We have learned that scientists begin their study by asking questions.  The next step is to make a good hypothesis and do some investigations to reach a conclusion.  Our class follows this scientific method with each lesson.  We have discussed where wood comes from and looked at five samples: Redwood, Pine, Basswood, Particleboard, and Plywood.  We concluded that wood comes from different trees, and some wood is made in factories.  We have also discussed things made of wood.  We did a wood hunt in our classroom and labeled things made from wood.  The class recorded what they are learning about wood in their Science Notebook.

Non-Fiction: An Apple a Day

We used An Apple a Day by Melvin Berger as a mentor text for our Non-Fiction introductory lessons.

This was our poem for the week.  We also used this in our diversity lesson with apples.

We used this story to make text to text connections with our non-fiction book.  We also enjoyed learning about the seasons of an apple tree and made a project to show how different an apple tree looks throughout the year.

Thank you to all our families for donating apples this week.  We enjoyed tasting the different types and making applesauce.

The class recorded how each apple tasted.

We used apples from my parent's apple tree for our diversity lesson.  The students examined their apple carefully.  Each apple was unique and different, just like each of us.  After they had a chance to talk about the characteristics of their apple, we put them together again and students had to search for their individual apple.  We concluded the lesson by cutting an apple open and discussing how each apple has a star inside...just like each of us.  My hope is that every student in the class realizes how special they are!

 My Mother and daughter came in to help the class make applesauce.  We were able to enjoy the applesauce with our afternoon snack.

Students made a pattern each day using apples for the month of September.

Word Work

We have been learning about the letters in our names for the first few weeks of school.  We have sorted  our names by looking at the first letter and have been sorting letters with magnetic letters each day.  Another portion of our word work study has consisted of listening for rhyming words in songs and poems.  

Shared Reading- Bears

The kindergarten students enjoyed reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.  We learned that the pictures match the words.  They help us to read the story.  It was fun to act out the story with all the different kinds of animals.  We also loved reading other books written by the same author.  At the end of the week, we made our favorite bears. 

This week we read Hairy Bear by Joy Cowley. Students loved retelling the story with a pair of bear puppets.

We used this book to help us learn the word "I".  It is a word we will find in lots of books and will be a word we can use in our writing.  Kindergarten students had time to search for the word "I" in other books and share this with the class.