Catching Up!

Wow, I was looking at some old pictures on my camera and found this adorable pictures of our Thanksgiving celebration when we made butter. I can't believe how much older the kids look now, 2 months later! Here's how we made butter... we poured whipping cream into our little Tupperware cups and shook our hearts out. Seriously. Our arms were TIRED. We sang a little chant as we shook: Shake it up, shake it down, shake it shake it, all around!

We were so relieved when the liquid finally changed to a soft solid chunk of butter. The kids LOVED sampling the butter on mini bagels. This was such a memorable day. Here we are, shaking!

Election Day!

We may not be 18, but we sure are excited about the presidential election! We learned about the candidates and the voting process.

Who will you vote for?

We talked about how voting is a secretive process - and it's not polite to ask people who they voted for, or tell them who they should vote for if they haven't asked us for our opinion. We checked off our vote on a ballot, then invited the other kindergarten classes into our classroom to vote too! When they were all done, we sorted and counted the ballots together on the floor.

Sorting the ballots - it was a tense few minutes!

As is typical with my class, we predicted the winner before it was ever officially announced! :)

The final results - kindergarten 2012 re-elects President Obama.

Congrats again, kids!

End of October Fun!

We had a fun last week of October! On pumpkin day, we painted pumpkins we brought from home and painted pumpkins on paper. We used a class pumpkin to take various measurements, including its weight, height, and circumference. We had a contest to see whose predictions were closest to the correct measurement. Here were the final results:

We also used a special math key called a "glyph" to create monsters who had a secret code about ourselves. They were adorable!

Leaf Decorating

Fall is here with a vengeance - brrr! We worked on fine motor skills AND decorated our class windows at the same time! Happy autumn!

Catching up!

Wow! What a month! Sorry for the delay in posting. Here are some activities we've wrapped up this month:

• CATERPILLARS! We successfully raised and freed two monarch caterpillars! We hope they're enjoying their vacation in Mexico! 

We made predictions about what our new class pet would be!

We looked closely at milkweed!

Good morning, friend!

• SPYING READERS! We went on a hunt around our school for readers in action. We found students and adults reading all around the building.

Aren't we the cutest?!

• We are Authors! We've all tried out the "share chair" for a chance to share our writing with an audience. Here are a few pictures from the first weeks of school, and our very first assignments as writers. I can tell I have a VERY talented class this year! 

Cops & Kids!

We had a BLAST last Thursday at our Cops and Kids event. We started in the cafeteria where we saw a police canine in action - it made some of us a little nervous to see how aggressive the dog could be, but we were relieved to see how well the dog listened to the officer, and how well he protected him as well! The officer reminded us to never touch a police dog without asking the officer first - a good reminder for all dogs, not just police dogs! Next we headed outside for an awesome presentation. We saw all sorts of police vehicles - cars, 4-wheelers, Segways, motorcycles and even a SWAT truck! We got to climb in and see what it was like to be inside most of these vehicles, including standing inside the SWAT truck on a big stool to peek out the top of the truck! Many of us chose patting the police horses as our favorite Cops & Kids activity! Check out the slideshow of pictures on the side of this page to get a glimpse of the fun we had!

Apple Day!

Apple Day was a HUGE success! Thank you to the families who sent in apples to share! We started the day by carefully slicing 16 apples into itty bits, scraping them into a crock pot, adding a bit of sugar and water and cooking our apples to make apple sauce. It took ALL day, and we could hardly wait until the end of the day when it would be ready! Here's a couple students sampling the goods:

While we waited, we made apple patterns using real apple colors and crazy apple colors (blue and pink??). We also weighed our apples to see how many cubes they were equal to! Kamden took the prize for the heaviest apple weighing in at 70 cubes! We stacked cubes to measure how tall our apples were and found that even our heaviest apples were the same height as our lightest apples. All in all, we had a GREAT day... and the applesauce was awesome!