A New Home For Mrs. I's Hermit Crab

As an end of year activity, the students worked very hard in small groups to create new sea creatures to create our own version of A Home For Hermit Crab. Each group worked together to create a 3-D sea creature for our Hermit Crab's new home. We then did a shared pen writing, where all of the students worked together to write a new version of the story, using their own sea creatures.

Here is the video we created with the help of the amazing Mrs. Klipfel!

Touch Tank

To cap off our amazing week of learning about tide pools and ocean life, we were visited by the wonderful Ellen Gothel of Explore The Ocean World!
Ellen brings in a wide variety of animals found in the North Atlantic including sea stars, lobsters, snow crabs, sea urchins, a living fossil the horseshoe crab, and many other animals. The Touch Tank visit is always fun and hands-on for the kids - the BEST kind of learning! 
There were so many great moments from the visit that we wanted to share, so we made another slideshow! I hope you have fun watching with your student - and maybe they'll share some of the exciting things they learned from Ellen!
Touch Tank Visit by Slidely Slideshow

Sandy Point Field Trip

Mrs. I's class at Sandy Point

This past week we visited Sandy Point to explore tide pools. We have been studying tide pools in the classroom and have even begun to create our own tide pool bulletin board, but we got to explore a REAL tide pool with our guide, Dave. 
The kids had a wonderful time working together under Dave's guidance and were able to find all sorts of sea creatures including crabs, sand dollars, seaweed, periwinkles, and moon snails. We learned a lot from Dave about the different animals and plants we found, what and how they eat, and how each work together to create a tide pool.
Watch our slideshow for all of the pictures from our day at Sandy Point!
  2015 Sandy Point Field Trip by Slidely Slideshow

Tide Pool Fun

This past week, we've been learning about the different sections of a tide pool - splash zone, high tide, medium tide, low tide, and the animals and plants that live in each of the areas. 

We learned a TON about sea stars, too. We not only created sea stars for our tide pool, but we also learned how to use a graphic organizer to help us remember the facts we've learned about sea stars and to write full sentences about them. The students really enjoyed this type of non-fiction writing. I cannot wait to see how their writing develops over the next few weeks as we continue to write about the sea animals that live in tide pools. 

Here is a sample of writing and the beginnings of our classroom tide pool. The next few weeks will be exciting and fun to say the least - I cannot wait to keep sharing your student's wonderful work!

We've been reading non-fiction books on sea stars this week. The students have learned about lots of genres of literature this year, including this very special genre of expository non-fiction that has a main topic (sea stars) and details about the main topic (they have 5 or more rays, they can be many different colors, they don't have blood!).

This student wrote about the sea star's stomach and how it comes out of the mouth, that it can stick to rocks, and that their arms are called rays.

The beginnings of our tide pool with our sea stars, mussels, and barnacles!

The best part of our tide pool bulletin board is that we made it 3-D! Thank you to all of the families for sending in recyclable materials.

Wait, there are books that have real things in them?!

Since the beginning of school, kindergarten has been learning about different genres of literature. First we had Fiction, then came Animal Fantasy,  next was the all exciting Folktale, and last, but not least, poetry. This month, we're learning all about nonfiction and...

What are the differences between  FICTION and NON-FICTION?

To begin, last week we discussed what we noticed about nonfiction books and made an anchor chart.

This week, we looked at the differences between fiction and nonfiction stories with a partner. The students looked at the books and discussed what they saw. Then, we came up with a new anchor chart: fiction vs. nonfiction.

The students noticed really wonderful text features of nonfiction books including photographs, table of contents, index, word list, and most importantly, that the books we thought were nonfiction had all real things in them. Last week, one student even saw that nonfiction books can teach us things!

When asked which book their group thought was fiction, they held up the books on the left.
When asked which were nonfiction, they held up the books on the right.

Now that we're a bit more familiar with nonfiction books, we did a fun activity with Scholastic book order magazines. We cut out books we thought were fiction and nonfiction and sorted them accordingly.

The student's LOVE learning about this genre mainly because they're in love with the National Geographic animal books. If you don't have any in your home library, Scholastic has them available to order through the monthly book order!

Tell Me How It Made You Feel..

It's been a while since we've shown you all our writing, so I thought ...
"what better time than now?!"
Now, as we move into the spring of kindergarten, we know how to be writers: stories have words AND detailed pictures, we write about things that happen to us, and we're using our own inventive spelling (went may look like wet OR because may look like bcuz). These skills show how far your student's have come as writers and how much they have learned so far. Just look where we were in September here!

Each time we begin Writer's Workshop we come together and help Mrs. I. write a story making sure we use what we know about letters and sounds and our sight words!

This month, we're beginning to focus on making sure we add in a sentence that tells the reader how it made the writer feel. In the above story, I used my opinion (the food was yummy) to tell the reader how I felt about my story. I am trying to help students move away from the old standbys: it was fun, it was good, it made me feel happy, it made me feel sad, etc. 
Now it's the student's turn to tell us how they feel...

I have a wiggly tooth. Hannah wiggled one of my teeth. My one tooth felt like it was bleeding.
[This writer is exploring adding in details about feeling physical things (which is still a feeling!)]

I went bike riding with my sister. It made me happy. And my mom (was there).

I saw the movie Big Hero Six. I went with mommy and daddy and Mary. I love it.

Keep a look out for more details in your student's writing. Ask them to make sure they tell you: 1. Where they went 2. Who they were with 3. How it made them feel

This is a writing Common Core Standard: W.K.3 - Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.

Thank You, Mystery Reader!

We want to send a BIG thank you to Mr. Winfrey for visiting us last week as our Dr. Seuss Mystery Reader! The kids loved hearing you read and about your wonderful work as a volunteer firefighter in Topsfield!