Word wall

I just have a few things to share and I am really trying to keep this one short and sweet. I'm working my kindergarten job, a part time retail job and putting myself through some university courses so time is of the essence. Right now I feel like I'm even scheduling meal times into my day planner just to time manage to the fullest. Okay, enough about that....

I wanted to share this new word wall Mrs. K and I created. We got the idea from another teacher (the one we do reading buddies with in fact). And we even asked our high school volunteer student to create the chart for us.... So I guess we really didn't make it at all hahaha. Any way, the point here is that this is a great idea. It just has post it notes on each of the squares and this word wall can be inquiry specific - as in for us, we are doing birds and working on our chicken eggs right now so we are filling this word wall with all the new words we are learning to go with our hatching program (incubator, hatching, brooding, comb, egg tooth, etc.). But this could also be used for just generic words the children are struggling with. Or it could be used for new words that get brought up throughout the course of the year. 

The children really took a liking to this chart and used it for their egg observation book. It gave them a bit more independence with their writing since they could easily walk over to the chart, find the letter of the word they were trying to spell and then using their sounding out skills to figure out which word they needed to use. It got a lot of use on its first day in our class!

Day 3 of our eggs

So here we are on day 3. The children are getting so excited now. It's a bit more palpable with their eagerness to go and visit the incubator. I wanted to share our egg wall again (in case you missed it yesterday):

So I put up all those eggs on our wall and every day that goes by I stick up what our chicks look like on the inside of their egg. It's a nice reference point for the children to look at and keeps us counting down to hatch day. Today our baby chicks are starting to get their limb stumps and their heart is starting to form. 

At lunch today we watched the magic schoolbus episode where they go inside an egg and get to watch it grow. We had watched it before but I decided we should watch it again now that we have our own chicks. They were so excited to see some of the similarities between our chicks and the magic schoolbus chicks.

We also added to our observation books today so the children drew out what the egg looks like and wrote a sentance. When they had finished day 1, 2, and 3 we let them sneak a peek at day 4 and 5 since we will not be in school over the weekend. Tomorrow our chicken's heart starts to beat and on Sunday they begin to look more like a chicken.

It's a pretty exciting time to be in our class! I'm sorry for the jumpy post today. It's a bit short and sweet as I watch my iPads battery level decrease. Have a great weekend and I can't wait to share more next week.

Day 2 of our chicken eggs

Only 19 more days to go! I made a chart for our wall today to mark the days. 

I just cut out egg shapes and wrote the day on them. Then I took a poster of the egg development, and cut it apart into individual pictures. I blew up each day to a much bigger size and cut them out. I laminated everything and now every day that passes, we will put up the picture to go along with it. 

I also made a sign to sit beside the incubator that says "today:" and then each day I put up what is happening inside the eggs. So today's said "Today: my eyes and ears are starting to form".

Our ihatch app today showed us how the vessels are forming in our little embryos and it now has eyes and ears. Pretty exciting. 

One more note before I head to bed... The kids are getting excited now. I saw it a bit in there play today and in their understanding of our new words like "incubator", "thermometer", and "Brooder box" just to name a few. Mrs. K made some science books today on her prep for us to start using. We made writing paper with an egg shape for the picture square and the lines underneath for writing. Each day we will encourage the children to expand on what they are observing and learning and write/draw about  it on there paper. Then we will have a nice book to send home in the end. Some of their drawings were so good today!

Our new friends

Sorry I haven't posted much. We had march break and then things just got crazier and crazier. I had been trying to get chicks in our class for a while and finally people started getting back to me but there are always hurdles to jump over. Now give me my 2 seconds to vent and then I will get to the positives... The big nail biter was that we weren't sure if we were allowed to do eggs anymore. So 2 weeks worth of inquiring and a whole bunch of people asking people asking people.... not to mention the fact that if we WERE allowed, there was a lot of prep I had to get done in advance, so just in case we got the all clear I spent a lot of time running around orchestrating everything ... And then we were told no. We weren't allowed to have eggs in our class because according to the day nurseries act chickens/chicken eggs cannot be in a classroom with children under the age of 5. I didn't even know we fell under the day nurseries act in the school system. So now let me jump to the solution to our conundrum. So keep reading.

There is a kindergarten class in our school that has children who are all over the age of 5. So they became the guardians of our chicken eggs. I'm happy that we kind of still get to experience this. And I'm happy that the host teacher is fantastic and doesn't mind at all even if we will constantly disturb her class for the next 28 days. It's just great that I didn't end up having to webcam the 28 days of chickens into the classroom from my bedroom hahaha. 

So my wonderful dad and sister drove out to pick up my eggs for me and then delivered them to the  school. Our incubator was being fixed so they picked that up too. It took me about 2 hours to get the incubator set up and the temperature steady. Then I got to add the eggs. What happy chickens they will be. We didn't really have any notice to prepare the children for their arrival since we had been waiting 3 weeks to hear if we were allowed to have them or not. Our chickens came today (Wednesday) and we only heard yesterday that we were not allowed. So the children were never told in advance. Which is too bad because we could have done some awesome activities in preparation for them. Once the incubator was all set up, we finally told the children. It was a hard thing to explain to them since the incubator and eggs were nowhere near us. We showed them pictures and talked about how exciting this will be. Then I told the children I was going to go out and add the eggs to the incubator and one boy said "you mean we have real eggs?" Did we not just have an entire conversation about this hahaha. Anywho, so we then took the kids down 4 at a time to see the eggs. 

We talked about how for the next 21 days all we will see is eggs but on the inside it is changing everyday. Now here is the awesomest part.... I actually found an AMAZING app that shows them what is happening on the inside of the eggs. I have my iPad everyday in the classroom so it was neat to get to use it for this purpose too. The app is an iPhone app (but works on iPad too) and  it is called "ihatch" if you are interested in it. Here is a screen shot of day 1:

So it starts by just showing the egg. Then you touch it and it shows you what it looks like if you candled the egg on day one. Then you tap it again and  it shows you the inside of the egg. Do you see that red spot? That's our chicken on its first day! You can swipe the screen and it has a write up about what is happening, and even gives you tips and reminders on the incubation. Amazing. What would life be like without technology (disclaimer: I do know what life would be like without technology. I am only a little naive, not a lot.)

I can't wait to share more about our eggs as time goes on. Stay tuned! 

Mold - a scientific choice

In health class, we have been talking about mold and germs. You can seriously ask my kids about germs and they will literally use the word "microbes" to explain all about it. Awesome. So we decided to do the mold experiment. We split up into 3 groups and thought about where we would find germs around our classroom. One group chose the classroom sink, one group chose the floor by our cubbies and the other group chose the toilet. It's only been 3 days now and no mold yet. I will update you when the excitement starts.

 

Take home reading program

This week, Mrs. K and I worked really hard to start a take-home reading program. We put together 19 of these duo tangs for the kids. I'm sorry the photos are a bit fuzzy but I think you can still make it all out. 

So they take the book and duo tang home on Monday and read it with mom or dad or someone else. Then on Tuesday they read it again. On Wednesday they read it again and draw a picture and write a sentance about it. Then on Thursday they return it. I am excited to see how many return it tomorrow and what they created.

Silly surveillance

Yesterday I had a group of the kindergarten kids with me in the cubby room. We have our bathroom right at the end of the cubby room and we often get some very silly things happening in there instead of using the bathroom. So I had this group of kids chatting with me in the cubby room and one of them says "what's that up there?" I asked "that box?" And he said "no the thing on top.":

I looked up and saw the box and little light he was talking about. I said "oh that. That light tells us when people are being silly in the bathroom. So if someone is fooling around or not doing the job they're supposed to do, then that light goes on to let the teachers know they need to come check it out."

Guess how many silly's we have had in the bathroom ever since?

Colour mixings and all the fixings!

So we got into colours and colour mixing lately. I've been busy slowly building and introducing new and different discovery bottles lately. The latest ones I made were about mixing colours. I used a Gatorade bottle and filled it up halfway with water and yellow food colouring and the other half was blue lamp oil. Oil and water don't mix so the 2 colours stay separate. When the child shakes the bottle the colours mix into green and then slowly separate again. How neat! A few of the kids were exploring How the 2 colours combine and make the new one. I was asking them questions and thought, hey. Why not take this up a notch. So we brought our exploration to the guided table and brought out the food colouring. 

I filled a water bottle up with water so we had it at the table with us. I grabbed a stack of these small clear cups ($6.99 at party city for a huge sleeve of them) and poured a small about of each food colour into 3 cups (red, yellow, blue). Here is where I got REALLY smart. I put a few Q-tips in each of the food colouring cups. That eliminated the potential pouring mess of the children pouring food colour (eeeeek), made it easier to see the colour (on the end of the white Q-tip), doubled as their stir stick and gave them the perfect amount of food colouring to play with. I added some writing to this activity by having the children first write the colours that they wanted to mix. They then poured a little bit of water into the cup and chose their food-colour-saturated q-tip.

Mrs. K came up with a great idea to preserve their colour mixing by pouring a bit of the water onto each of the words. Then the puddles dried and we could see which colours they made.

We extended this activity later in the week kind of by accident. We read the book "sky colour" during library since we are working our way through the silver birch books. We decided to run with the colour theme a bit deeper and actually got out some paints. We only gave the children red, yellow, blue, and white on a paper plate. They each got 1 paint brush, their own tiny clear cup of water and 3 tiny clear cups to colour mix in. 

One of the children accidentally dropped his paintbrush on his paper and it made a red line. He shrugged and said "oops, that's okay, I will make it into a rainbow!" I just loved that.

Do you have any other ideas to expand on this?