News for May 27

News for May 27

Another 4-day week but the students in Room 101 were very busy, as usual!

The big news for the week, was our Spring Concert. The students worked very hard to learn and practise the two songs for our performance. On the night of the concert, the children did a wonderful job. I was so proud of each and every one of them!

The second piece of big news is the arrival of our caterpillars. Every child has his/her own caterpillar to watch grow and develop into a painted lady butterfly. The students set up their caterpillars in a small container that has special caterpillar food in it. They had a chance to look at the caterpillars and noticed that they were black, with small spikes. Some children noticed that their caterpillars have small white dots. Everyone saw the small round pieces in the container and learned that those were the caterpillar's poop!

The class continued with the math unit on money. This week the students studied the pictures on the six different coins as they learned the names and values of the coins. We set up a store in the house centre with boxes of food to buy and a cash register for the children to "pay" for their purchases.

The children are fascinated by the ants in our playground. This week we did an experiment. We put out pieces of cracker and watched how the ants crawled to the food. We discussed how the ants communicated to the other ants that there was food. The students reasoned that somehow the ants "talked" to the other ants to tell them about the food. On another day, we put out pieces of carrot and some ants came to check out the carrot but not as many as for the cracker. So the class reasoned that the ants prefer crackers over carrots!
For our caterpillar unit we read Casper the Caterpillar a story about a caterpillar who isn't quite sure who he is. The children also saw the movie version of Eric Carle's classic story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. As always, more information about the books we read in class can be found at our sister blog:

http://planet5books.blogspot.com/

The class said good bye to our student teacher, Ms. Griffin this week. Although she spent most of her time with the afternoon class, the morning class had a chance to work with her this week as she had an opportunity to be in charge of the AM and PM kindergarten program for one day. We wish Ms. Griffin the best of luck in her career as a teacher!