A Fun Week in KA!

This week we continued our study of amphibians by comparing and contrasting frogs and toads. We also traveled to Giverny, France where we met a funny little frog named Antoinette who kept trying to sneak into Claude Monet's paintings.

We had a fun visit from some Upper School Earth Science students. They had each created a children's book about the rock cycle and shared them with each of us. We loved the books, and we loved being able to touch the rock samples they brought too!

We are continuing our study of measurement in math. We had lots of really fun math activities, and one of our favorites was "Measure Me." We paired with a partner and traced our body outline in chalk. We then had to use our hands as our unit of measure and estimate how many hands it would take to measure our whole body and various body parts such as our arm, leg or waist.

We also discovered that you could fit 65 KA students down the hallway! Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. Magner said they would love to have that many students if they were just like us.

We were very excited to see that our painted lady caterpillars had become butterflies. Mrs. McKinney helped us release them into the wild. They were ready to find their new homes and flew away quickly. We look for them every day at recess.

Amphibians All Around

We were so excited to "hop" on the bus and ride to Riverbend Park.

 We started our adventure by having our snack at the picnic tables.

 Half of KA joined KB and the other half joined KC. Our group started on the nature walk. We loved turning over "tree cookies" to discover amphibians hiding in dark, moist places.

 We saw a few American toads, the most common toad at Riverbend Park. This little guy was cute but really wanted to return to his leaf pile.

 We saw several different colors of red-backed salamanders and loved learning that they breathe through their skin. We also learned that salamanders can get sick if they are handled too much because holding them can dry out their skin.

 Our guide Mr. Ethan showed us a small pond full of wood frog tadpoles. We could have watched them for hours.

 After our nature walk, we ventured inside the Nature Center where we saw a toad eat two worms. We were fascinated to learn that toads don't have throat muscles to help them swallow. They have to close their eyes and blink. The blinking pushes their large eyeballs down on top of its mouth and this helps squeeze the food down its throat.

Mr. Ethan introduced us to a rat snake. Some of us were eager to touch him while others were reluctant. We thought the snake was smooth, scaly and a little moist. We were excited to touch a snake skin that had been shed. Mr. Ethan taught us that you can tell a snake is about to shed its skin when its eyes become a little milky and their skin gets shiny.

 We enjoyed looking at all of the species in the tanks. We saw snakes, turtles, toads, salamanders and much more.

A special thank you to our parent chaperones. We loved sharing this experience with you!

Popping with Adjectives and the King of Ing

KA was invaded by even more bugs this week. Mrs. Magner loved to catch us reading, playing games and and writing with the compound vision goggles.

We returned from music on Tuesday and thought the room smelled delicious. Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. Magner had made popcorn for us. We used our senses to smell, taste, touch, see and hear the popcorn. Then we learned about adjectives and came up with the most amazing adjectives to describe our yummy popcorn. We decided that we could contribute even more adjectives if we had more of the crunchy, buttery treat!

  

We also learning about -ing words this week. We all became the Kings of Ing
 and made crowns to help us remember our -ing words.

We loved learning a new money game during math. It is called Race to a Quarter or the Coin Trading Game. We can't decide if we love the game Bankrupt or Race to a Quarter more. Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. Magner love hearing us so excited about math.

Kindergarten is such a magical time, and our teachers are so thankful that they are able to watch us grow and discover.

Going Buggy in KA!

We have had so much fun studying insects this week. We went on a bug hunt with our 4th grade buddies. We used magnifying glasses, nets and bug boxes to take a closer look. We found exoskeletons, spiders, crickets, earthworms and more.

 

Sometimes it was hard for Mrs. Magner to take a photograph of us because we were so very excited to be outside looking for insects.

We learned that insects have compound vision and have between two and 30,000 lenses in their eyes. We tried on these compound vision goggles to simulate what an insect sees. We laughed and laughed when we tried to write our names with these goggles on. We told Mrs. Peterson that insects might not be able to move to first grade if their handwriting didn't improve!

Mrs. Magner will try to capture Sabien, Gabriella, Leticia, Jack and James going buggy in these goggles too.

 

Mrs. McKinney delivered some painted lady catepillars to KA, and we love watching their metamorphosis. We also each have our own mealworm and check on him/her every day as part of our morning work. We get very excited when our mealworm molts!

 

 We have been doing lots of fun centers during Daily 5. One of favorite new centers is Sentence Dice.  We make each other laugh with our funny sentences each day.