Friday, June 13, 2014

The last week of school!

Well it's finally upon us! Our kindergarteners have graduated and will soon be first graders (after a very fun summer of course). Thank you to everyone for such a wonderful school year. Here are some pictures of our final celebrations.

End of the Year Family Party
Last week, we invited all of our family members to help us celebrate the end of the year. First, we had to give a gift to our principal, who is retiring this year.


Next we shared our final published books, as well as our Kindergarten Memory Books, with our family members.




Then we watched a slide show of photos from the school year. It was so cool to see how much the kindergarteners had grown since the beginning of the year! After that, we headed off to the all-school picnic.


The Last Two Days of School
We played a really fun game outside called "Drip Drip Drop," which is essentially a water version of Duck Duck Goose. They had a blast.






Then on the last day of school we had our final recess on the kindergarten playground. Next year they'll be joining the big kids!






After our all-school assembly, I presented each kindergartener with his/her diploma, and then we threw up our graduation hats in celebration. (I should mention that I was asked about twenty times, "What if we can't find our hat after we throw it in the air?" I assured them that I would make sure everyone got their hats back so they could keep them forever. :) )


Congratulations kindergarteners, and have a great summer. Come visit next year!

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Learning about water quality from a guest teacher

We were lucky enough to have two students from our high school's environmental science class come to teach us about water quality! They did a very cool, hands-on lesson where the students learned how to identify and count macroinvertebrates in the water, and use this data to determine if the water was "clean" or "dirty." This is some high level science learning for kindergarteners, but they were up to the task! Check out the pictures of these scientists hard at work.

First we took a look at the water samples and tallied the total number of leeches, worms, snails, mayfly larvae, and damselfly larvae.







Then we shared our results. We didn't find any damselflies, but lots of worms and leeches.



Our high school teacher taught us that this means that the water is very murky and dirty, which is not ideal for lots of organisms (including humans)!


Afterwards, we played a game matching pictures of adult and larva macroinvertebrates. Thanks to both of our high school scientists who came to teach us!



Then we even got to look at actual organisms!