Read-a-Thon

The Friday before spring break was our annual Read a Thon day! We didn't follow the regular daily schedule, but instead had guest readers, extended independent and partner reading time, and projects related to favorite books. Here are a few pictures of the day!

Making "Oh the Places You'll Go" hot air balloons with our reading buddies

Tapping our maple tree!

As the spring season approaches, we've been talking about what happens in spring. We were lucky enough to have two naturalists from the local nature center come to teach us how to tap our maple tree in the front yard! We got to learn about when trees produce sap, how to identify a maple tree, and how to drill a hole for a spile. Then we got to sample both sap directly from the tree, and already-produced maple syrup. It was so much fun!

Shapes, shapes and more shapes!

Our math lessons this past month focused on 2D shapes, and we really did a deep dive into them! Here are some of the activities we did to learn about the names and attributes of 2D shapes. (If you want to ask your kindergartener what the "mathematician name" for a diamond is, you could! Hopefully they will answer "rhombus.")

One of our explore tables had this provocation at it, which involved (very carefully) using a thumb tack to poke holes into a shape's outline, and then hold it up to the sun. This was an awesome fine-motor activity and the kids asked to do it repeatedly.

We also used marshmallows and toothpicks to construct shapes, and then counted how many sides (toothpicks) and vertices (marshmallows) we used.

Our math lessons involved a lot of shape games, including this one where you spin the spinner and trace whichever shape you get, then see which shape wins.

For Forest Friday, we worked with partners or a group of three to create shapes out of nature.

We also read lots of shape books, such as The Shape of Things, which takes a simple shape and adds features to turn it into something else. We all did our own version of this process and turned it into a class book!

Then we combined lots of shapes to a bigger object. I loved seeing what they came up with!