Wow, already March!

Before the February break, kindergarten students from our team participated in science stations around Force and Motion. We broke the kids into three groups, mixing kids from our class, Ms. Read's, and Mr. Deyo's. They visited each teacher three times, to participate in three different stations. One was a ramp challenge, trying to build a ramp to get a ball to roll into a cup. Another they learned about machines through Mystery Science (a school subscription we have) and did another engineering challenge, and in my group they learned about force with bingo chips and toy cars.

Our Wilderness Wednesdays have been quite modified this winter, as the weather has been incredibly cold! We have been out in the morning and then later in the afternoon when the sun is out and things warm up a bit. For stations this week, students participated in spray painting with food coloring in the snow, building ramps for another engineering challenge outside, playing "camoflouge" on the big hill (predator vs. prey tag), and learning about the four ways animals adapt to winter (hibernation, dormancy, staying active, or migration).  Hopefully soon the weather will warm up and we will be back to our full day outside!

In math we have had two big focuses, learning about shapes and teen numbers. We have been playing many games to work on naming shapes and knowing their attributes, and understanding teens as ten and more. We have been playing many number line games, as a warm up and then practicing at our stations. It is such a treat to have Mr. Houde and Ms. Liberty in our class, to be able to run a station as well! 

In literacy we are continuing our work learning new sight words, reading books at our levels, meeting in small groups to practice new reading strategies and challenge ourselves. We are beginning a new unit of writing this month, revisiting writing true stories. Students are working especially hard to leave spaces between their words, stretch our words to hear beginning, middle, and ending sounds, and being able to read their own writing. 

This week we have welcomed a new friend to our class, and it has been so heartwarming to see our community be so kind, caring, and welcoming! 

As we continue to build our classroom community, we also had a lovely opportunity this week for two friends to do a share together. Lucy shared a drawing she made of Adem as an artist, and they coshared some of Adem's artwork and some they had done together at a lunch bunch. Adem did some live drawing in front of the class and they were blown away by his talent! They were so inspired we had an impromptu drawing class where everyone gave it a try! 

Click here to see more photos of this sweet moment!