May

The month of May is always a busy one! We are completing literacy and math assessments to look at individual student growth over the year, and coming full circle with our life cycles studies. We have learned about chicks/birds, tadpoles/frogs, and plant life cycles. We are doing experiments with what plants need to grow (light, soil, water) and growing cucumber plants as well as some spring vegetables in the garden (kale, lettuce, spinach, peas). There are so many exciting things to learn during this inquiry process. We also learned about how chicks grow inside of eggs and the things they need for that to happen (fertilization, 100 degree temperature, correct humidity). Nine of our chicks hatched on Tuesday which has been very exciting! We found some tadpoles one morning out back of the classroom in the swampy area and have kept some in an aquarium in the classroom, again learning about what tadpoles need, what their life cycles are, and how to care for living animals.

We are continuing many of our regular routines like writer's workshop (making how-to books), reader's workshop (building stamina, reading harder books, working in partnerships) and math (teen numbers, and equations). We are also practicing the songs for our frog play and this week students had a chance to share what characters they might like to be and then were assigned a part for the play!
We had a school wide Changing Perspectives event in the gym, featuring four stations to learn about empathy, fine motor challenges, red zone feelings, and autism. This was a nice culmination of the work we have done in kindergarten learning about disability awareness.

This week was also Public Works week, so we had a special visit from the Williston Public Works Department who taught us about what they do and brought a bunch of equipment for the kids to check out. They absolutely loved it!