Fruit Exploration, Texure Walk, Visit from the Sheriff's Dept.

Ok, truth be told I got a little behind on the blogging.  David was about to return from his deployment, so in the days leading up to his return any spare moment was spent Marie Kondo-ing our home.  Then, obviously, I was overjoyed to spend some time with him in his return.  So my free time left little room for blogging.  I failed you! But I'm back. :)

Let's take a look at some of the things we've been up to:

August 25, Five Senses Fruit Exploration-

Students used all five senses to observe and explore fruit.  It was easy to tell which fruit was which with our sense of sight, but then we had to close our eyes and rely on the texture and feel of the fruits.  To make things even more challenging, we peeled and cubed some similar-looking fruits.  With our sense of sight alone, we could no longer tell which fruit was which.  We had to rely on smell and taste to be sure!

August 26, Five Senses Texture Walk-

Students took off their shoes and enjoyed the feel of various textures beneath their feet!  Students felt things that were soft, smooth, hard, rough, squishy and wet.

August 29, Visit from the Sheriff's Department-

Mrs. Watkins is married to a police officer and had this wonderful idea!  Shirley Hills Elementary School is promoting positive views of police officers by hosting a monthly appreciation day for them.  Once a month, officers will come by our school on rotation to sit and eat lunch with our elementary students.    Kindergarten students made the first batch of appreciation cards. 

For a lot of kids, their only understanding of a police officer is "you arrest bad guys and take them to jail."  It was pretty cool for the kids to have the chance for a Q&A with various officers.  Just look at that look of admiration:

September 8, Count & Dump Math Game-

Students roll one die or two dice.  They count that many of their counters as they place them in a cup. When finished, their partner dumps the cup and counts to check his/her partner's work.  Then it's the next player's turn.  This is excellent reinforcement for checking your work!

September 8, Fabric Texture Sort-

Students worked in groups to sort a bag of fabrics based on various textures. 

September 9, Books on Parade-

As our Readers' Workshop Unit 1 came to a close, we celebrated with our favorite books on parade.  Students selected their favorite books they've heard/read so far this year.  We awarded each with a blue ribbon, and headed around the school to show everyone our top choices!  Mrs. Dunlap, the API, listened to students' favorite parts.

Look at those SMILES! They're so excited about their books! LOVE IT! 

We ended our parade in our Book Buddies' classroom, reading our favorites to our fifth grade partners:

Next post will be a look into our new Reading and Writing units.

Five Senses

We've started getting to the real meat of the curriculum now, and in Science, we've focused on the Scientific Method and using our five senses to explore the world around us.

Last week, I introduced the five senses by asking the kiddos to close their eyes and use their sense of hearing and smell to figure out what was happening:

Once they knew, they were able to say it out loud and use their sense of sight to watch it pop.

Of course they got to use their sense of touch and taste to enjoy a snack!

On Wednesday, we had a problem to solve.  Using each of our senses, we recorded our observations about unlabeled salt and sugar trying to figure out which was which:

I like that one of the comments was "salt will taste salty and sugar will taste sugary!" ;)

On Friday, we talked about the steps of the Scientific Method (ask a question, form a hypothesis, test your hypothesis, observe and record what happens, come to a conclusion) and I asked the kiddos what would happen when I mixed water, glue, borax, and food coloring.  I got guesses ranging from "honey milk" to "soda" to "cookies" to "play-doh."   We discussed how it couldn't be something edible since two of the ingredients (borax and glue) weren't edible to begin with.  Play-doh was the closest guess!  We got slime!

(To make your own slime, mix 1/2c glue and 1/2c water in a bowl.   Add food coloring for colored slime. In a separate bowl, mix 1tsp borax with 1c hot water until the borax is dissolved.  Add the glue mixture to the borax solution, stirring slowly.  The slime will start to form! If it's too liquidy, add a little more borax.  Don't worry if it gets too grainy/thick at first. It's better to be more solid than more liquidy.   The more you knead it, the better the consistency will become.)

Today we followed up on the steps of the Scientific Method and asked another question: Which liquid  (water, milk, lime juice, soda) will help prevent apples from turning brown?

We have to revisit this experiment tomorrow for the conclusion.  The bell rang before any serious browning happened!

Mr. Potato Head 5 Senses

To review our 5 senses, we made Mr. Potato Head (an updated version from last year).  As we added each body part, we wrote what sense it helps us experience (e.g., eyes to see).

To get this project for your own classroom, check out my TPT listing HERE.

Observing & Sorting by Weight, Texture

I really enjoy science and math units on sorting.  I'm pretty sure the kids do, too.  They have to think hard about all the different ways to sort, work together and discuss what they're doing out loud, and really look closely at the items they're given.  

I always open with the same lesson: dumping caps all over the floor and seeing what attributes the kids come up with to sort by!  In this picture, they're sorting by caps with ridges on the side and caps with no ridges on the side.  It was a chorus of "Ridges!" "No ridges!" "No ridges!" "Ridges!" as little feet moved frantically around the carpet.

Each day, we've had something different to sort.

Have you ever noticed how much kids love rocks?  I can't blame them; I had a rock collection when I was little that I still cherish to this day.  When I saw that we needed to sort by weight, I knew we had to weigh some rocks.  I didn't know just how well the lesson was going to go! We covered observation, estimation, counting, graphing, sorting and number lines in addition to discussing why some rocks which appear to be the same size differ in weight.  (One of our so-called rocks was actually charred wood, so we had a nice chat on composition too!)

Step 1: Find rocks. Each kid got to find his/her own rock.  Step 2: Explain how a balance scale works. Estimate how many cubes the rock will weigh.  Step 3: Count how many cubes it takes to balance the rock.  Step 4: Place the rock above the numeral showing the number of cubes it weighs.  Step 5: Analyze and discuss the resulting graph.

If your kid brought home a dirty rock, this is why! I had some kids say, "Mom won't let me bring rocks in the house." I told them, "I bet if you can explain why you have it, she'd let you. Just tell her how much it weighs!"  (Says the nearly twenty-seven-year-old who still picks up rocks and pretty leaves on hikes. Le sigh.)

Side note: Aren't you loving this carpet? We are.

Annaley brought us a special treat this week! A baby timber rattlesnake to observe! Don't worry. It was dead. (More specifically, missing a head.) And jarred. But this sparked some great discussion.  We watched a brief video on this type of snake and talked about what we noticed.  My students (and friends and family!) know how much I love snakes. I thought this was so cool.  Let me go ahead and link back to this post when I caught a snake and brought it into school! 

They were so intrigued. 

Today we moved on to exploring our sense of touch more with different textured fabrics.  We found out that our most sensitive skin is on our fingertips, but that any of our skin will respond to touch.  We felt textures with our hands and decided how to sort!

Then we took off our shoes and had a little barefoot fun!

We discussed which materials felt good beneath our feet and which ones we could do without.

How do you like to teach sorting? 

Any great ideas for sorting by flexibility? 

Sorting materials?

Throw 'em my way!

Match That Smell!

I remember going into the Hallmark store with my sister one time and her getting incredibly frustrated at how long I was staying in the candle aisle, smelling each and every candle.  She complained that the smells gave her a headache and that she was ready to go, and I went on and on about how I couldn't decide which candle to get (I probably ended up with five or six) but that it didn't matter because I just enjoyed smelling them all!

You'd think this kind of behavior would have led me to come up with this lesson idea on my own, but it didn't. So before sharing, let me just say that a fifth grade teacher at my school is the one who had this idea.  She had the entire activity set up and ready to go and offered to share it with kindergarten. Thanks, Mrs. Blanton!

Okay, so here's how it goes. There are about 25 film canisters with one of five different strongly-scented wax chunks at the bottom, under a cotton ball.  The canisters are labeled with the numbers 1-25.  Numbers 1-5 each have a different scent, and these are used as the "home base" scents.  These are placed at different locations around the room, and students get a chance to smell each one.

Then, students are given a random canister.  Their job is to smell the scent in their canister and match it to the correct scent out of the five home bases.  You'd think this would be an easy task, but only three students got it right on the first try.

The teacher has an answer key, saying which numbered canisters match the scent in canister 1, canister 2, canister 3, etc.

Despite it being a challenging activity, the kids said they had fun and enjoyed the smells.  

The only thing I would do differently if I redo this activity would be labeling canisters 1-5 with what type of scent they are.  For instance, Canister 1: Apple Cinnamon.  Canister 2: Fruit Loops.  Canister 3: Sugar Cookie.  I think having a name to compare the scent to would help some of the kids narrow it down. 

I also think I may have needed coffee beans for students to smell in between each canister to cleanse their nasal palate.  The smells all start to run together eventually.

Five Senses Nature Walk

In searching for new activities for teaching the five senses, I stumbled upon this pack of free activities which included a nature walk recording form.  Being one that loves the outdoors, I was super excited to share this lesson with the kiddos.  

I had a loose idea of where we'd go on our nature walk, but was pleasantly surprised to find this as we kept walking:

I mean, really. Are you kidding me? We have an outdoor classroom and I didn't even know it! (This also shows you how much fenced-in property the school has, if we have all this and I had no idea.) We will certainly be using this in the future. We can write outside! Read outside! And obviously, explore outside!

Just look at those little scientists go!

And everyone is so happy!

Our Five Senses

This week we started our unit on the Five Senses!  I love teaching the senses.

On Monday, we learned a little bit about sharks while exploring our sense of sight. We saw pictures of sharks in books and saw a shark tooth with and without a magnifying glass.  As we looked under the mangifying glass, we noticed some sharp, ragged edges and some cracks in the teeth!

On Tuesday, we focused on our sense of sound.  We listened to various audio clips from this site.  We had to try to figure out what we were hearing just by listening. We were pretty good at it! Some of them tricked us, like the train bell and the steamboat whistle.


Yesterday we explored our sense of touch.  We glued something soft, scratchy, fuzzy, rough, smooth and hard to our paper so we could feel the various textures.  Then we drew a picture of something we knew felt the same way. 'Scratchy' was hard for us, until I remembered... beards are scratchy! Haha. Many of the kiddos could relate. :)

We also made our Mr. Potato Head craft in the morning to review all five senses.  As we added the parts to Mr. Potato Head, we wrote which sense we can experience with each body part.

Today we highlighted our sense of smell.  I prepared some bags with some scent-soaked cotton balls. Students got to take a whiff of each scent and decide which one was their favorite.

The scents I used were: (1) BBQ, (2) Garlic, (3) Soap, (4) Perfume, (5) Cinnamon and (6) Basil.

Students were pretty grossed out by the look of the basil soaked
cotton ball, but I told them to focus on the smell... it ended up being
their favorite scent!

In order from our most favorite to least favorite: Basil, Cinnamon, Perfume, BBQ, Garlic, Soap.

Surprisingly, even though the soap smelled pretty good in my opinion, a lot of the kids said "EW! Soap!" after smelling it. Haha.

That leaves one sense left... taste! Just in time for our sorting activity with shape snacks tomorrow. 

Don't forget TOMORROW IS AN EARLY RELEASE DAY!!!!

As always, owl be teaching you tomorrow!