Week of January 30th

This week has been a busy week and I don't forsee us slowing down until vacation. We started the week with a visit from Shelburne Farms' friends. Linda and Maya were in our classroom. They reviewed how to look for signs of animals in winter with us and then took us outside to look for those signs and play some games. The most popular game was "Camouflage". The children got to go into the field and tried to blend in with their surroundings. During the first attempt, Linda found most of the class but during the second time, we tried a new location and she couldn't see anyone. They did a great job of blending in to their environment as an animal would do to protect itself from a predator. We also played a game where the students got to choose between being a red squirrel or a gray squirrel and hid some pretend acorns (actually wood circles). The red squirrels hide all of their acorns in one place and the grey squirrels spread them out in different spots. Then they had to go back and try to find all of their acorns. Most of the class was successful. Check out our photos from the morning.

We continue to learn about penguins in math and will be writing reports about them next week. So far we have studied the Rockhopper penguin, the King penguin and the Little Blue penguin. We are comparing each of these penguins on a big comparison chart. For each penguin we read a poem about them, cut a string to their height to compare to our own, and for some of the penguins we weigh cans to get an idea of their weight. We didn't use the cans for the King penguin because it weighs too much. We will be learning about the Gentoo penguin, Chinstrap penguin and the Emperor penguin in the next couple of weeks. We will have a culminating event to share all that we have done and learned with parents. This will happen on Thursday, February 3rd at 10:00 am. Invitations will come home in the next week or so.

In writing this week we wrote a class report on frogs and each child then wrote a report on tadpoles. They used information they learned from a Gail Gibbons book called "Frogs". Next week they will take what they learned and write reports about penguins.

Next week we will celebrate our 100th day of school on Wednesday. I have some fun activities planned for them on this day. I can't believe we are at this point already! We will also attend the Kindergarten dress rehearsal and the Voyager play. There is lots of fun stuff for us to do.

Have a wonderful weekend,
Nancy