After quite a few weeks of hard work we have finally wrapped up our informational writing about our nature name animals.  Kindergarteners were asked to revise some of their pages for this project, which is something we haven't spent a lot of time doing this year, but a task they will spend more time on in first grade.  Completing all of the pages took a lot of perseverance!  Everyone loved working on the accompanying project, creating the animal's habitat in a box, and then making a model of the animal.  Each child will have an opportunity to share with the class and then the books will be sent home along with the projects.

During ECO this year we have been very fortunate to be joined by Mary Colleen Sinnott, who initially came as an intern with North Branch Nature Center and had so much fun she kept coming.  Wednesday was her last day with us as she has other commitments this spring.  She generously wrote a song about bees to share with us and also gave our class several cecropia and prometheus moth cocoons.  We will be eagerly watching these over the next several weeks.

We have begun our final science exploration, states of matter, paying particular attention to solids and liquids.  We have compared jars of solids and liquids, noting some differences between the two:  solids keep their shape, while liquids take the shape of the jar and when we pour them, liquids flow easily, while solids generally do not.  On Thursday we explored water using eye droppers, which was lots of fun.  I heard lots of excited exclamations and children made interesting discoveries.  We noticed that the drops always have rounded edges and if two drops get really close to each other they "jump" together to form one bigger drop.