Beach day and meeting the baby chicks

So much has happened in the two weeks since I last posted! I am constantly amazed at how much these little guys are learning and discovering on a daily basis. And now we are fast approaching the end of the year! I'll try to post more photos than normal since so much will be going on in the next three weeks. If any parents or family members would like copies of the pictures, please email me and I can send them your way!

Beach Day

Here are some photos from Beach Day, which we celebrated as a reward for good behavior. (The number one goal was for the whole class to come to the rug quickly, quietly, and safely every day...it was a challenge but we earned it!)

Here we are playing with the letter beach ball. When you catch the ball, your thumb will land on a letter, and you have to come up with a word that starts with that letter.

Some adorable beach gear. This day happened to be a freezing May day, after several days of warm weather. But it didn't worry us when we were inside!

Here we are in our airline seats, on a "flight" to the beach. I was the pilot, and we were going to watch an in-flight movie called Finding Nemo. But don't forget that passengers on airplanes don't talk during the movie...

Meeting the baby chicks

As part of our science curriculum, kindergarteners get to take care of baby chicks! Chickens eggs hatch after a 21-day cycle, and we received our eggs on day 18. So we kept them in an incubator and got to see them just hours after they hatched! As they grew we studied them and even got to touch them. Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of survivors (only three out of six hatched across the whole kindergarten grade) so we couldn't let all the kids hold each chick, because it would damage them. So Ms. Breuer, our resident chicken expert, let us pet its downy feathers as we asked questions and took notes.

We used our science journals to take notes on what the eggs looked like, and then when the chicks hatched we also sketched them and took more notes. The notes the kids took on the chicks cracked me up. Keep in mind that the only directions I gave them were "Draw what you see, and make sure you label what you know." I'm not sure how they all ended up labeling the poop.

This next one is actually a talk bubble coming out of the chick's mouth, saying "peep." Guess we need to work a little bit more on our vowel sounds...

I meant to take note of what this says, but all I can decipher is "the feathers omein..."

And I just had to add this picture, even though it's unrelated, because it's so cute. They worked so hard on this United States puzzle and are so proud.