Choice time is an integral part of each day in our classroom, providing children with an opportunity to be self-directed, pursue their own ideas, and practice critical social skills in a less structured setting.  It also gives them an opportunity to integrate their learning into play, a wonderful way to synthesize new understanding and practice skills in different contexts.  Some recent choice times found children:

• writing recipe books
• using animal track stamps to make tales with tracks
• studying photos of tracks and drawing/writing about them in science notebooks (thanks to Sarah for sharing both the track book and photos)
• watching birds at the feeder and in the surrounding trees    
• creating game boards and using them to play the game
• reading an animal track book 
• creating structures with various materials    
• building an animal hospital to care for sick and injured animals

Writing recipes- what do you like in your smoothies?

A boat with lots of fish.

Creating a game board...

and playing the game.

Reading about tracks.

Caring for sick animals.

For the last couple of weeks we have been talking about animals in winter and the various ways animals survive when cold weather comes.   We have focused our discussions on three things animals might do:  migrate, hibernate, or remain active.  We were thrilled to have Lindsay join us for ECO yesterday, when we looked for signs of some of these active animals.    We began our morning learning about four animal gaits: walking, bounding, hopping, and waddling.   Children had a chance to practice each gait and we sorted animals by their gait, noticing that walkers tend to have longer legs, bounders have shorter legs and long, thin bodies, hoppers have powerful hind legs, and waddlers tend to have shorter legs and stouter bodies.

Waddle like a bear.

Hop like a rabbit.

Walk like a deer.

Once we were outside we broke into three groups and became detectives, searching for tracks around the school. It's amazing how prevalent the tracks are once you start looking!  We wrapped up our outside time with tea.  After lunch for quiet time we became bears and hibernated!

Spraying tracks with colored water to highlight the trail.

River Otter

For the last several weeks during art class with Mrs. McDonough kindergarteners worked on these fabulous nature name portraits.  They are on the bulletin board just outside our classroom and are definitely worth checking out in person!

Coyote 

Chickadee

Cottontail Rabbit

Bobcat

Red Fox

Moose

Black Bear

For the last several weeks we have been practicing building words using magnet letter tiles and then tapping each sound to decode the words.  I tell students the sounds for the word one at a time and they locate each letter to build the word before we tap the sounds with our fingers and then read the words.  This is providing good practice finding letters arranged in alphabetical order and hearing all of the sounds in a word, a skill that carries over to writing.

Building words with letter tiles.

As we wrap up our geometry unit, students worked in teams to create posters for 2 different shapes. They had to write at least one sentence about the shape and then show examples of the shape.  While this was designed to tell me what they have learned about each shape, it was also a wonderful opportunity to practice cooperation and compromise.

On Monday we celebrated our 100th day of school.  Children had fun trying to count collections of 100 things, making 100's crowns, and searching for pictures with objects up to 100.  We will celebrate Valentine's Day next Friday, February 12th!

In math this week we continued our geometry unit with an exploration of 3-D shapes.  Children had an opportunity to compare spheres, cylinders, cubes, and cones, noticing each shapes defining features and how the shapes are similar and different.  They tested the shapes to see if they could roll, slide, or stack and sorted them accordingly.  They also tried to create their own models of each shape using play dough- a task that is much easier for some shapes than others!

Continuing our exploration of 2-D shapes, we read the book Grandfather Tang's Story, by Ann Tompert.  This is a tale told with tangrams about two fox fairies who shift their shapes to become new animals.  We followed this by making our own tangram animals.

During math on Fridays we have been moving away from our regular routine and working on problem solving.  For children at all grade levelsAn important math skill to have is making sense of problems and persevering in solving them.  We have had discussions about perseverance and what it means, connected to both math and life.  We have also revisited the idea that some of our best learning comes from mistakes, so it is better to take a risk and make a mistake than not take the risk.  I try to find problems that have more than one solution,  allowing students to demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways and lending themselves to rich discussion both while we are solving the problems and when we share solutions.  Last week our problem involved seating all of the students and adults in our class using different shaped tables.  This week's problem involved building towers using 10 blocks, with no two towers having the same height.  As a class we were able to find all of the solutions.

Our class seated around tables!