Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Family Night, Building Day, and Torrey Pines!

Good evening everyone!

Thank you so much for all of your participation in the last week!  Our Family Night was a big success!  Friends were really excited to audition, rehearse, and set up the classroom for their performance of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's The Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker Cure.  It was great to see the students actively work together to help make this show the best it could be.  During rehearsals, friends gave each other feedback about different actions and lines that they could say when in character.  My favorite part was seeing each student make the character come to life in their own unique way!  We love reading from Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, so if you haven't check that book out, I encourage you to!

I am still working on editing the recording of the play.  If you have any pictures of this special day, please email the to me!  Thank you!

This past Saturday was our Building Day for the Beautification Project of the front of our classes!  Many families came out and helped to build FOUR more planter boxes!!  It was great to see kids helping carry wood, take measurements, and use power tools!  Thank you to everyone who came out to help BEAUTIFY our school!  I'm so excited to get these new planter boxes filled up, so if you can help us get SOIL, please bring in what you can!  Thank you in advance!

We had a beautiful field trip to the Torrey Pines Natural Reserve!  What an exciting opportunity this was for us to learn more the importance of taking care of nature.  We have talked about this many times and have discussed different reasons why taking care of nature is important and why we should leave nature in it's home instead of taking it with us.  It's even one of our agreements for our Gardening Crew!  Now, after hearing an expert, we feel even more confident that nature is something beautiful and should be respected.  It's always so exciting hearing friends give each other reminders when it comes to how to take care of our surroundings.  We asked some great questions and I was very impressed at how well did on our trip!  We recognized each other for our efforts of being respectful visitors!




The museum created quite a stir for us.  Looking at the "stuffed animals" brought up a lot of questions for us.
Are these animals real?  If so, why aren't they moving?
What are they stuffed with?
How come they're in the positions they are in?

Some friends already have some theories about this.  I'm anxious to see how this helps foster more inquiries in our conversations!

Thank you to all the families who helped us with this trip!  We couldn't have done it without you!

Thanks for checking out the blog and for sharing your wonderful children with out community!

Love, Gaby

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Different ways to count, organize, and theorize!

Hello Loving Kinder Gardener Families!

It's been a while, and so much has happened!  Last week we went on our field trip to the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theater, where we watched "The Year of the Dragon" and we also had the opportunity to visit the Air and Space Museum!  Thank you to everyone who helped make our trip a safe one!

The 100 Day Party also happened last week.  It was a great success!  Here is a snap shot of some of the things we did....


The excitement of this day lives on during our Open Choice Time.  Friends are still finding different ways to count to 100 as well as different ways to organize their work.  We are constantly getting feedback from friends to make sure our work is clear to others.

Liam is working on counting to 100 by one.


Maximus is working on counting to 100 by twos.

Laura and Ava work together to count to 100 by fives
.
Maya uses different tools in our classroom to check the shape and order of numbers as she counts to 100 by tens.

During Revisiting Meeting, Noah helps Ava and Justice calculate their score from their game of Ball Toss.

He wrote the equation and showed the steps on how to get to the final score, however, we were not sure how to write the solution...

We used our counting straws to help us check how many hundreds, tens, and ones made the number one hundred twenty five.

After checking our work, we agreed that 125 was the correct way to write the answer!

In other news, there has been a new topic of discussion in our class that many friends are torn about.  We have been wondering about ghosts and whether or not they exist.  If they do exist, how do ghosts happen?  What are they made of?  Where do they come from?  What do they do?  

There were many interesting theories and anecdotes shared by different friends about how they feel about ghosts.

Liam:  Did you know ghosts are real?...
Avery:  Yeah, they're dead humans.
Natalie:  You could even walk through a ghost.
Brice:  Ghosts are not real.... Because they're not around in San Diego.
David:  If there were dead humans, how would dead humans come back alive?
Justice:  Ghosts are not real.  Ghosts are white and they have black eyes...  If they were real, people would see [them]
Liam:  No, they're invisible.
Avery:  Ghosts are real because my great aunt told me a story that happened to her, and there's a magic word that makes ghosts appear in the dark...
Friends:  What is it?
Avery:  Kapoot. 
Kyle:  And ghosts live in graveyards. Ghosts are souls... they take them to graveyards and they just bury them and they turn into a zombie and the ghost will come because my cousin says ghosts are not real.
Isa:  Once at night, I came downstairs in the kitchen and I turned the lights on, and when I turned off the lights, it turned back on.
Natalie:  Maybe it was a ghost.
Skye:  Last night with my dad, we were driving to my mom's house, and sometimes he turns the gas on and the light on with a switch, but then, sometimes, the light turns on by itself, and there were no doors that were opened.
Demetrius:  Ghosts are real, because I went to my grandma's house, and I went in the forest, and a ghost whispered something in my ear.
Gaby:  Not everybody agrees that ghosts exists; If you do think ghosts exist, how does a ghost happen?
Avery:  You die and then sometimes if you come out of your gravestone, you're a ghost.
Kyle:  No, because there are some ghosts that come out of the graveyard, they just go into people's houses and they just lock the door from people and they just take over their bodies.
Gaby: So you think ghosts go into houses and go into their bodies?
Kyle: Yeah and then they turn into zombies.
Gaby: Ghosts turn people into zombies?
Justice:  No, they don't go into people's bodies.  You can't survive from ghosts.  They just kill you.
David:  Ghosts can go through your bodies.
Matthew:  Ghosts are mean.
David:  Ghosts can go through doors because they're not actually real people.
Isa:  You can go through ghosts.  And ghosts can turn flat and go through doors... through the cracks.
Noah:  How do ghosts come out of graveyards when they already died?
Maximus:  They can go through the box.
Gaby:  Through the coffin?
Maximus:  Yeah.
David:  If they could go through the door, they could go through everything.
Maximus:  And they blend... you can't see them when it's light out, you can only see them when it's dark.
Maya:  They come out because they could go through the metal signs that they leave for the people that die, and if they can't go through, they have to go around.
Kyle:  Ghosts are like water.
Liam: ...Tv's and cameras can see ghosts.
Gaby:  Do you mean the infared cameras?
Liam:  Yeah because ghosts are made from electric, they eat electric to make them.
Gaby:  They consume energy?
Liam:  Yeah, they consume energy.

This was a very exciting conversation and we decided that we were going to journal about their ideas.  Here is the brainstorm of some key words in relation to ghosts.


It is interesting looking through their journals and seeing how so many of our friends had the same idea of a ghosts' features.  Though everyone worked independently, many friends work looked very similar...


Today we followed up with our discussion because many of us were still confused about ghosts and what they were and whether or not they were real.  Everyone agreed that we needed to understand this concept more, so we decided to dissect what a ghost could be made of and how they compare and contrast from living people.  We used a Venn diagram to organize our thoughts.


This discussion had given us a great opportunity to create and hear different theories.  I am impressed at how the friends have been able to respect each others different points of views and ideas.  No one was trying to convince other friends to believe their personal feelings, but mostly enjoying the chance to speak their voice!  Some of us are planning to write stories and plays about our ideas!  I look forward to seeing how they choose to portray their theories!!

Have a great night!
Love, Gaby